Uma lésbica na Bocolândia

This article proposes an interpretation of Virgindade inútil: Novela de uma revoltada (1927) by Ercília Nogueira Cobra as a counternarrative of the nation. The novel provides an opportunity for a revisionist reading of Brazilian modernity and modernism based on the author’s radical critique of prescriptive notions of gender and sexuality in the process of articulating the country’s national identity in the early twentieth century. This article demonstrates that Virgindade inútil constitutes a counterpoint to the dominant national ideology, dismantling its foundational formation, the heteropatriarchal family, and inaugurating another order by introducing a familial arrangement composed of two women and their daughter. In Cobra’s narrative, the transgression of established gender roles intersects with the subversion of heteronormative sexual morality, enabling us not only to broaden our understanding of Brazilian modernism but also to imagine another Brazil, in which freedom is born of women.