Little Red Riding Hood in different itineraries: female characters in Argentinean folk narrative

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to inquire into the discursive construction of corporality in oral narratives collected in Argentinean contexts, in an intertexual comparison with European ones. I give priority the semiotics of corporality, addressing the body as signic network, which inform expressions of identity. I associate performativity with a praxis, i.e. with actions produced in a context from speech acts, verbal and iconic statements, musical and body language. I understand the performance, both as an act of producing an aesthetically message as spectacularized representation of social life. The aim is to identify in the narratives strategies of legitimizing social beliefs, dealing with a a rhetoric of embodiment and care, articulated in narrative form. The expected results tend to study the rhetoric construction of corporality and to articulate a theoretical reflection regarding the relationship between body, narrative and local social beliefs in folk matrices of a universal tale type such as Little Red Riding Hood.