Women and Agroecology: the building of new political actors on familiar agriculture

Abstract

The present study analyses life trajectories of peasant women who participate in agroecological movements organized in Brazil during the last thirty years. Through organized groups, campaigns,commercial and productive experiences, they have mobilized themselves around a social network, the National Articulation of Agroecology, in order to make visible women’s point of view in this area. The aim of the study is to demonstrate how -- through their social practices and in dispute with other political groups -- these women have obtained legitimacy for their demands related to the environmental management and sustainable development and, as a result, have constituted themselves as new political agents. Feminist Studies, particularly Ecofeminism, the social network theories, as well as studies on life trajectories were utilized as theoretical frameworks for approaching the subject. It was observed that despite their different upbringings and life priorities, these women have built common identities as peasants and activists of the women’s movements. Such commonality is a result of their involvement in political actions which question gender inequalities in the countryside as well as the unsustainable productive model. Once peasants and submersed in oppressive realities from their experiences in their own families, they face the contradictions of questioning the current productive model and struggle for their own reproduction based on more sustainable models. Their trajectories show how a movement of social transformation feeds itself from ruptures and continuities. Also: how their participants can deal with such contradictions. The study shows that if it were not for the contributions brought about by the constructivist perspective of the Ecofeminism would not be possible to understand the barriers these women have to cross in order to participate of the political struggle as well as ways and motivations that lead them to build their feminist and environmental activism in order to get over these barriers. Like feminist activist that have preceded them, they come from their questioning of their own structural conditions (means of survival) to ideologically interpret and“break”the system that oppress them, specially in regards to the construction of their subjectivities, which is essential to grasp the role of men and women in their relations with the natural environment. They are organizing themselves to transform the current system by projecting their ideals and utopias which have been built through their political action. They neither see themselves as victims of the system nor saviors of the planet; they are women struggling for their rights to be the owners of their own lives and as such contribute to the transformation of the unjust world in which they live