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.