Gender and the semiotics of political visibility in the Brazilian northeast

Abstract

This article analyzes how local narratives on political leadership in Northeast Brazil make use of gender ideologies. Previous research, and ethnographic work, suggests that there is a deep contradiction between women's central roles in local social and economic activities, and the ways in which they are depicted in dominant narratives. Through the analysis of ethnographic material and the case of the displaced community of Jaguaribara, we argue that local political rituals function as meaning-making practices that affect the political visibility of women, through the manipulation of local gender ideologies and local perceptions of society and the environment. We further suggest that awareness of such a state of affairs and the pragmatic strategic use of cultural prescriptions do not grant a group political visibility, if this group does not find ways to act upon the semiotic configuration of the context where social actions unfold; that is, upon dominant local interpretive genres.

Keywords:

• gender
• politics
• visibility
• semiotics
• Northeast Brazil

Acknowledgements

Zulma Amador provided constructive critical commentaries on an earlier version of this paper. This research was supported in part and at different moments by the National Research Council of Brazil (CNPq), by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, by the Ruth Landes Memorial Fund, by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, by the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (Columbia University), and by the Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study. Quotes were translated by the authors.

Notes

1. Roughly US$1.50/day per capita in October 2005.

2. Iconization is a process of semiotic manipulation proposed by Susan Gal and Judith Irvine, working upon Peircean semiotics and the metapragmatic theory (Gal 1998; Irvine and Gal 2000). It refers to the process by which linguistic differences, indexing social contrast, are reinterpreted as icons of these social contrasts (Gal 1998, 328). In this process, ideological representation fuses some of the group's linguistic qualities with other supposed qualities of the group, and it is then perceived that one is the cause or inherent essentiality of the other.

3. The semiotic process of fractal recursivity (or recursiveness) involves the projection of an opposition that marks one level of a relationship onto another. For example, intra-group distinction can be projected onto inter-group relations, or vice versa.

4. According to Gal and Irvine, this constitutes a process of erasure. Erasure refers to a situation in which an ideology simplifies a sociolinguistic field, by directing attention to specific parts of it, therefore rendering some linguistic forms or groups invisible, or recasting the image of their presence and practices to better fit an ideological scheme (Gal 1998; Irvine and Gal 2000).

5. “Mal falada”: denigrated.

6. In the words of Waterman, “the construction of resistance at any level that is predicated on structures of oppression or suppression at other levels or is contained through them, is problematic from the start” (2001, 4).

7. The local priest had been relocated to more important municipalities. In Jaguaribara, mass was given on the third Sunday of each month, conducted by priests who came from other parishes.

8. Sister Bernardete is also not affected by other kinds of regimentation, as those related to the role of women in the local patterns of family organization, which can have a negative impact upon female participation in social movements. See Thayer (2001).