“Socio-territorial movements and gender: emergent feminisms in the outskirts of São Paulo and Buenos Aires from the MTST and FPDS performances (2023)” by Helena Sabino Rodrigues Cunha | Master’s Thesis

Abstract: “This dissertation aims to analyse the models of social organisation of Latin American urban peripheral populations, comparing women’s political performances and the organisation of solidarity network in the scope of the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), in Sao Paulo City, and the Popular Front Darío Santillán (FPDS), in Buenos Aires, in the course of Covid-19 pandemic. To understand the context in which each movement act, there have been made comparisons of both cities’ urbanisation development, giving special emphasis to the process of peripherization and the formation of urban social movements in each context. The MTST’s and FPDS’s performances have been analysed, mainly, from the perspective of socio-territorial movements studies, considering the crisis intensified by the pandemic as a method of reading societies affected by the coloniality of power. The focus of this work was to identify women’s participation in the building of solidarities during the pandemic. Methodologically, it is a qualitative research, which uses oral history as the method of collecting data. There have been interviews with militants from both of the movements, through ground research conducted in Sao Paulo and in Buenos Aires. Based on this methodology, it has been verified that both of the cities’ processes of urbanisation keep a lot of similarities due to, among other factors, the industrialization process implemented in Brazil and Argentina. However, there are historical particularities in each process that explains the development of different kinds of socio-territorial movements in each context. In the case of Argentina, due to many reasons, including the high indexes of unemployment, there has been a predominance of the formation of unemployment workers’ movements in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In Brazil, the fast and disorganised urban growth was one of the reasons that led to the formation of socio-territorial movements that centre their claims for an urban reform in cities like Sao Paulo. Both of the movements count with a high participation of women, which can be explained, among other reasons, by the higher unemployment and informality index among them and because of women’s historical centrality in the maintenance of the home and in the care tasks, due to established gender standards. During the pandemic, it has been observed that, in one hand, there has been a growth of the demand for gender violence services, while in the other hand these women had a central role to guarantee the survival of their communities, since their acting in comunitary dining halls and in the guarantee of their families and neighbours care. From the decolonial and Latin American feminisms perspective and based on the interviews that have been conducted for this research, it has been analysed how, in this process, new sociabilities are forged, guided on care valorization, horizontality and collectivity, contributing therefore for the emergence of peripheral feminisms.”

 

This master’s thesis, written by Helena Sabino Rodrigues Cunha and supervised by Vivian Grace Fernandez Davila Urqidi, was defended in 2023 for the “Integration of Latin America” masters program at the Universidade de São Paulo. It is available, in Portuguese and open access ate USP’s Repository.

 

Photo: Georgiana SaintClaire (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

ANO

2023

AUTORES

Helena Sabino Rodrigues Cunha

EDITORES

Vivian Grace Fernandez Davila Urqidi