Abstract
The rigorously inventive lyric of Luiza Neto Jorge (1939-1989), one of the most distinctive voices in Portuguese poetry since the 1960s, cultivates as its substantive and instrumental fulcrum a consistent emphasis on gendered corporeality. Neto Jorge’s textualization of the body (particularly of the sexual body) gives substance to the complex discursive reflection on the gendered construction of cognition and experience that takes place in her poetry. At the same time, the poet’s attentiveness to the physicality of language—manifest in her adroit use of deconstructive wordplay and precisely engineered syntax—brings into focus the reciprocal permeability of linguistic (and therefore also social) and corporeal matter.