Cartographies of Survival: Disputing Democracy, Reimagining Community: Learning with Women in Grassroots Movements

Abstract

To survive. This is the main battleground of peripheric bodies (body-territory), particularly indigenous, black, poor and trans* women. By adopting a transdisciplinary and mixed methodology, this research conducts decolonial excavations, traces genealogies of discourse, and pays attention to the oral histories of women (body-archive) engaged in grassroots movements in Brazil. Bearing on that, the dissertation proposes a decolonial and feminist epistemology for confronting the epistemicide of the knowledges produced by women from Latin America. Initially, the work frames the interplay of law and violence through the category of feminicide. In this territoriality, the edges of the legal mainstream approach to violence are identified with the term, “front door of violence”, that the research firstly delineates, and then purposes to pass through it. In this way, the work moves from the surface of the debate on violence to excavate the undergrounds of modernity. The mapped genealogies situate the notion of “othering” as a mechanism of political extermination of Others, a process that has shaped and been shaped by legal discourse. By blurring the binary divisions of modernity, this dissertation traces the joints that articulate body to territory; private to public; reproduction to production; micropolitics to macropolitics; family to nation; difference to equality. By exposing the formation of constitutional democracy, the analysis finally faces the current crisis of the neocolonial structures of society. Instead of adopting the paralyzing grammar of apocalypse or backlash, the work frames the crisis as a potential locus for political disputes and for conceptual redefinitions. In this way, the study brings to the center five major disputes carried out by peripheric women concerning the issues of: politics of rights, (neo)colonial division of labor, feminicide, the legal system, and institutional politics. The movements of speaking, naming, working, organizing, defining, occupying, representing are embodied by this work as cartographies of survival.