This panel explores Brazilian narrative and visual art through the lens of form as theory, centering the vulnerable, exposed, and unfinished body as a site of ethical and aesthetic inquiry. We focus on works that make their own construction visible: self-reflexive, metanarrative, or self-staging artifacts that invite viewers and readers into complicity while simultaneously resisting total understanding.

In narrative, these texts seduce with story while interrupting it: fragmented plots, ellipses, and narrative abrasions foreground the fragility of bodies and lives under patriarchal and heteronormative constraints. Here, vulnerability emerges in characters’ embodied experiences, revealing the costs of coherence and the violence of normative social structures.

In visual art, bodies are staged in decay, absence, or imperfection, emphasizing affective resonance over polished completion. Fragmented, partial, and interstitial forms trace the limits of representation, making the viewer conscious of what cannot be fully contained or mastered.

By examining how Brazilian narratives and art make the body both central and unstable, we argue that these forms cultivate a critical ethics: insisting that the story of sexuality, identity, and social constraint be read where it fractures, where it interrupts itself, and where the body (vulnerable, resonant, unfinished) refuses to be rendered seamless.