Outras falas: feminismos na perspectiva de mulheres negras brasileiras

Abstract

This thesis investigates the trajectories of Brazilian black activist women in order to understand how inequalities of race, gender, class and sexuality are transformed into instruments for the construction of their own organization, an arena for protagonism and the exercise of successful experiences in challenging constituted powers. It also explores how the feminist discourse has been recreated by the specific demands of black women. The central argument of the thesis is the assertion that black activists in Brazil have developed their own feminist thought in the light of the historical knowledge, practices and experiences of black women’s resistance. It is a critical feminist thought supported by values, principles and a cosmovision organised by black African frames of reference which defend the plurality of epistemology in order to reveal black women’s contributions to a range of knowledge areas. A black feminist thought that sustains theory and praxis aimed at effectively transforming not only women’s lives, but society itself, since it is founded on confronting the power structures of: racism, sexism, class division and heterosexism. A thinking that seeks the decolonization of knowledge, that is, one which relies on the shedding of epistemic European knowledge in order to consider its own history through categories based on our experiences as black women in the Diaspora. I adopt the intersectional perspective in the thesis as a lens for a reading of the context in which the activists operate; a lens also used by Brazilian black women’s movements to carry out their political intervention activities. This category is shown to be useful in recognizing the ways in which different axes of oppression are structured, producing inequality and adverse situations with the multiple discrimination of specific groups of women, such as black women. As a theoretical-methodological framework, I use Oral History to reclaim and record the statements of 22 activist members from Brazilian black women’s movements, obtained in interviews. Within Oral History I opt for life history interviews conducted so as reveal the relationship between social history and each deponent’s individual trajectory and thus to understand how they have constructed their identities out of the references of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, religion and others, having as their setting events in Brazilian society.