Do silenciamento à participação política: as mulheres em atuação na brigada Caetés no MST-PB

Abstract

The Rural Workers Without Land Movement (MST - acronym in Portuguese) began in the 1970s, as a product of Brazilian farmers’ fight for their land, and it carries, in its core, the resistance of said farmers against the large concentration of lands in the hands of a small number of landowners, a common practice in Brazil. With the presence of women inside this movement as well as the boom the feminist movement saw in the country, there is an incentive for the discussions around gender to start taking shape in the movement, and with that, a chapter titled “the mobilization of women” is included in the general guidelines of MST (1989), and in the year 2000 the gender sector of the movement is created. After the creation of the gender sector, the parity of gender is determined inside the sector coordinations and directories, thus ensuring the participation of women in decision making. The Caetés Brigade, as well as all others, is organized with ways to ensure and encourage the political participation of women in the movement. The objective of this study is to problematize how the political participation of women in the Caetés Brigade (Paraíba - Brazil) takes place, based on the assumption that the Brigade is a limited sample, but works with the same principles and organization as the MST as a whole, and the main question is how women inside the Brigade undertake their political participations from their positions in the coordinations and directories inside the movement. The studies made by Gohn (1997) and Scherer-Warren (1989) concerning social movements were used to bring reflection on this matter, the study by Dallari (1983) was used to discuss political participation, and for a reflection on gender issues the studies used were by Scott (1995) and Nicholson (2000). This is a qualitative case study which uses the methodology of participant observation and semi-structured interview proposed by Gaskell (2014), and the data was analyzed using the content analysis proposed by Bardin (1977). The proposal of this study is inserted in the field of gender studies within social movements. Besides the interviews and bibliographical resources, documents and guidelines for MST taken from the internet or provided by the local leadership were also used as references for the construction of the dissertation. This study was conducted in the Caetés Brigade, located in the Brejo and Curimataú regions of the state of Paraíba, Brazil, and its collaborators were the four women in positions of leadership in the coordinations and directories of said brigade, the interviews took place between November 25 and 27, 2018. By cross referencing the theoretical data available with the data acquired from the methodology used, it was possible to comprehend how the women in the Caetés Brigade develop their political participation with daily struggles to effect land reform and recognition of women in the field, but that they already consolidated spaces, always searching for a better quality of life and the strengthening of social movements, especially the Rural Workers Without Land, in which they work