Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on how Amazonian Quilombola women’s investment in their education and financial independence has transformed Quilombola masculinity, and the patriarchy embedded in patronal relations in the Brazilian Amazon.

Paper long abstract:

“As mulheres estão indo embora” (the women are leaving) is a phrase that I heard at the very beginning of my research with Amazonian Quilombolas almost twenty years ago, and which has stayed with me ever since. It was jokingly uttered by an elder as he reflected on the spate of marital separations taking place at that time. In this paper, I will reflect on what was happening then, and how it connected to changing gender relations in Amazonian Quilombos following collective land demarcation in the 1990s, and as a result of women’s growing investment in their education and financial independence. I explore how the increased confidence and mobility acquired by Quilombola women as a result, allowed them to challenge traditional Quilombola conceptions of masculinity, and more recently how it has helped them to both side-step political conflicts between Quilombo men and, concurrently, attempts by local patrons to reassert control over Quilombo land. The paper will consider how patriarchy is embedded in racialised patronal relations in the Brazilian Amazon, how it entraps Quilombola men, and how Quilombola women refuse the traps that it lays by drawing on the powerful female figures found in their landscape.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with Haitian women in Chile, this presentation examines how bureaucracies conceptualize need and dependence based on feminist and humanitarian ideals and patriarchal and maternalist state narratives in a Latin American setting of intraregional mobility amid multiple crises.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I revisit Wendy Brown’s proposition of ‘gendering the state’ (States of Injury, 1995) to account for the ways bureaucracies conceptualize need and dependence based on feminist ideals. Based on ethnographic encounters between Haitian women and public bureaucracies in Santiago (Chile), I unravel the contradictions between understandings of migrant humanity on the one hand, and patriarchal and maternalist state narratives on the other. I explore the affordances of humanitarian benevolence and gender-based compassion at the core of care rationales toward racialized migrant women in a postcolonial and neoliberal Latin American society living through multiple crises. By comparing the disparate stories of two Haitian women in their strive for care and dignity, I analyze the dislocations within migrant protection and governance to make sense of how contemporary statecraft becomes sedimented by everyday experiences of racial aggression and gender violence. Through the exercise of ‘gendering the state’, I show how grounded practices of bureaucratic care and subjectivity transform Haitian women’s desires to realize their life projects in and through intimate relations of power and institutional encounters. In doing so, I reflect on the ambivalences raised by an ethnography of care and dignity within state bureaucracies among those who are racialized as disposable and dispossessed others.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the frontier might help to theorise gender by reflecting on ‘fits’ possessing Indigenous schoolgirls in Guyana. Rather than explaining this phenomenon, I dwell on a central facet of its experience - that is uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers how the frontier, as an unstable edge, a zone of potentiality, trauma, transformation, and struggle (Tsing 2005), might help to theorise gender. It does so by reflecting on ongoing ‘fits’ possessing young Indigenous women resident in state-run secondary schools in Guyana’s ‘hinterland’, an occurrence which produces shock and disruption. Rather than attempting to explain the cause of this phenomenon, I dwell on a central facet of its experience - that is uncertainty. How might frontier economies and the construction of young women’s bodies be drawn together and apart, each characterised in turn by respective uncertainties and ongoing contestations between insides and outsides, produced intentionally or otherwise?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores confinement, respect, love, violence, resistance and morality in a state-run shelter. How can the confinement of underage girls unravel a moralised construction of gender and sexuality?

Paper long abstract:

Young Egyptian women accused of inciting immorality, sexual perversion, and prostitution may be confined in government-run shelters. The paper argues that their incarcerated bodies reveal the depth of the state’s construction of a certain moral and social code that must be understood in historical context going back to the 1800s. This history is connected to the stories of women who endure incarceration today, positioning themselves vis-a-vis state and society. Despite continuous surveillance and discipline, women find spaces to battle social constructions of society, religion, and the state. Paying close attention to their narratives of love and hope, intermixed with the violent enforcement of a moral code, the research aims to show how young women re-establish their own sense of worth and envision alternative future lives. The research contributes to anthropological debates on women’s agency in Islamic and Arab societies.

Paper short abstract:

I demonstrate why colonial urban economies and their contemporary continuations may have increased sexual violence against women in a context of increased awareness of 'women's empowerment' and 'gender equality' in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I consider the ways colonial infrastructure, urbanisation, and increasing alienation have impacted local taboos, protocols, and prohibitions that once kept women safe(r) from sexual violence. As many researchers focused on this area of research in Papua New Guinea have highlighted, alcohol, drugs, and increasing commoditisation have led to transformations in sexual relations between men and women. However, the social and material landscapes created through colonisation (e.g., infrastructure and consumption patterns) require further attention.

During fieldwork in Goroka, a market town in the Eastern Highlands, in 2014, while focusing on market women and food exchanges, I did not expect to come into contact with men who would tell me stories of sexual violence they themselves had committed. However, in quite unexpected circumstances, men narrated to me when, why, and how they had come to be involved in rape and sexual violence in the period following Papua New Guinea's independence (1975). Other men explained that there were very clear rules that protected women in the pre-colonial and early colonial era but that these had dwindled with urbanisation and the decline of "tumbuna pasin" (ancestral ways).

Paper short abstract:

How do internal and colonial patriarchal systems intertwine in the lives of Yukuna-Matapí and Tanimuka-Letuama women? What tensions emerge in authority, shamanism, mobility, and paths to emancipation?

Paper long abstract:

My aim is to contribute to theorising patriarchy in Amazonian societies by analysing the intersection between internal or ancestral patriarchal orders and those derived from colonial structures. I focus on the embodied experiences and spatial trajectories of Yukuna-Matapí and Tanimuka-Letuama women from Colombia's eastern Amazon. Drawing on life narratives, I explore how these patriarchal expressions manifest somatically, revealing intricate entanglements of subjugation and emancipation.

I delve into internal patriarchal orders with a focus on father-daughter relationships as well as bonds with traditional healers or shamans. Marked by expectations, affections, and tensions, these relationships play a pivotal role in shaping women’s lives. I then examine how these forms of authority materialise in marriage and mobility, highlighting gendered divergences in patterns of belonging, territorial use, and spatial trajectories.

Inspired by indigenous community feminisms, I explore how women navigate these hierarchies thereby both perpetuating and transforming patriarchy. I seek to account for the ways that power operates across bodies, cosmologies, and colonial legacies.

Paper short abstract:

Transformations in gender relations and forms of collective representation among the Korubo of the Vale do Javari Indigenous Territory (Amazonas, Brazil) are currently underway. I highlight the emergence of male leadership in contexts where forms of female authority formerly prevailed.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss some of the transformations in gender relations and forms of political representation among the Amazonian Korubo, highlighting the emergence of male leadership where forms of female authority previously prevailed. I analyse these transformations in dialogue with the classic debates on “matriarchy.”

Today, approximately 130 Korubo individuals, distributed along the Ituí and Coari rivers, are considered by the Brazilian state to be “recently contactacted” while a smaller group remains in “isolation” within the Vale do Javari Indigenous Territory. During my initial encounters with the Korubo in late 2018, the term "cacique" was often used humorously when referring to non-Indigenous people who would buy items for Korubo persons, or take them on trips to the cities. In contrast, this word was used more seriously by non-Indigenous people in relation to the Korubo. Through field research conducted in Korubo villages along the Ituí River between 2019 and 2020, I observed that the term cacique was used by the Korubo in their demands for access to “white people’s things”: healthcare services, learning the Portuguese language, and acquiring numerical knowledge. However, in daily village life and in the absence of non-Indigenous people, other forms of authority took precedence, such as that of a category of older women: "matxo". Matxo denotes adult women who exhibit certain traits associated with Indigenous leadership, such as controlling bride service and managing relations with government agents.

Paper short abstract:

Alongside rising fascism in Brazil, we also see the rise of indigenous women's feminist movements. I ask how we can walk alongside them, building a feminist anthropology and a gender policy capable of combating neoliberalism and growing fascism.

Paper long abstract:

Gender has come to the center of fascist agendas. In 2017 Judith Butler came to Brazil and suffered hate attacks for talking about gender. She asked, “who is afraid of gender?” inviting us to develop a gender politics that opposes neoliberalism instead of transforming it into its instrument.

Fortunately, we see the rise of indigenous women's feminist movements. In 2019, the first March of Indigenous Women happened, and in 2021, ANMIGA (the National Articulation of Indigenous Women Warriors of Ancestry) emerged. Regional organisations are also popping up, such as the Women's Movement of the Xingu Indigenous Territory. In a General Assembly in late October 2024 feminism was a recurring topic.

If indigenous women in Brazil talk about being ancestral warrior women, but also about being root women and seed women (ANMIGA Manifesto), I ask how we can walk alongside them. I seek to analyze their strategies and to reflect on the possibilities of building a contemporary feminist anthropology that aligns with a feminist politics capable of combating neoliberalism and growing fascism.