EROTISMO E O PODER DO CORPO NA OBRA "A CASA DAS BELAS ADORMECIDAS", DE KAWABATA YASUNARI

Abstract

The power exercised by the naked body, the youthful freshness, and the physical decay of the elderly construct the complex relationship between the dominant and the dominated in Kawabata Yasunari's novel The House of Sleeping Beauties (1961). The discourse that sanctions the symbolic structures of masculine and feminine signification is dissected and reevaluated at the moment of self-awareness to the fragility of the social structure, which attributed to Japanese man dominance over women. In this sense, when the protagonist Eguchi, 67 years old, seeks a house of prostitution, whose service was to offer middle-aged men the opportunity to enjoy the company of young virgins, the lost virility can be resumed in the subjective scope of a meeting without dialogue, without interaction, without the regulation usually credited to the socially required standards. However, perversion and the sense of mastery liquefy itself at the moment when the previously unquestioned identity of the ¨macho¨ is confronted with the supremacy of the young body, with the self-consciousness of the inability to consummate the sexual act, transforming the desire into despair. Thus, based on Michael Foucault's discourse of regulation and power relations discussed in The History of Sexuality (1976), this paper aims to present how the eroticism and the power of the body serve as tools for understanding the disintegration of representations of identity, attributing to man and woman new discursive positions that go beyond the definitions of gender.