Colonial abject futurity: queer bodies, desire and form in Clarice Lispector’s A Via Crucis do Corpo

Clarice Lispector's oeuvre has increasingly been recognised as feminist not only in Latin America but globally. This article argues that A Via Crucis do Corpo (The Via Crucis of the Body, 1974) enacts a distinctive literary-political formation, named here colonial abject futurity, which brings Kristeva's abjection, Lugones' coloniality of gender, and Muñoz's queer futurity into sustained relation within a historically specific framework for reading Lispector. Focusing specifically on the short stories “Ruído de Passos” (“The Sound of Footsteps”), “O Corpo” (“The Body”), and “Praça Mauá,” the article examines how Lispector's work destabilises patriarchal logics regulating the body, desire, and ageing, while demonstrating how the collection's formal heterogeneity is not a failure of craft but the structural enactment of its politics. Situating Lispector at the intersection of colonial gender regimes, authoritarian governance, and queer decolonial theory, it proposes colonial abject futurity as an analytical category for Latin American literary studies and Global South queer scholarship.