On women, pans, and politics: imagining decolonial gendered urban spatialities

ABSTRACT

Over the past decades, several collective urban experiments led by women in Latin America have revealed female reproductive work as a critical element in effectuating the right to the city. Amid a global crisis of social reproduction exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is pressing to ask: What tools are available to imagine a production of space that is effectively feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial? Drawing from proposals from Latin American feminist authors, I discuss how the combination of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism has shaped social reproduction and modes of resistance. To do so, I reflect on the experience of a group of women living and working together in an ocupação in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The analysis uses data from research carried out in 2018, involving interviews, informal conversations, and participant observation. These women’s experiences allow us to understand how these practices create theory that relates to their reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Social reproduction
• decolonial feminism
• the right to the city
• urban occupation
• communal kitchens
• Belo Horizonte

Acknowledgements

I thank all the women who kindly agreed to engage in this research; Isabela Barreto for the partnership in the fieldwork, and both her and Tiago Castelo Branco for the insightful discussions that helped to shape this paper; and the GenUrb team for their careful reading and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I opted to maintain some expressions in Portuguese and Spanish recognizing they do not have a suitable translation. In efforts towards decolonization, language is also an important territory to rethink cultural erasure.

2 Cimarronaje was any kind of resistance to the colonial power, from refusing to work to setting up free communities. Quilombos were free settlements built by runaway enslaved people that played an important role in dismantling slavery in Brazil. Till today, quilombos still exist, preserving their ancestors' resistance and modos de vida (ways of living).

3 Gonzalez (1984) also decries the “false” inclusion of Black people into academic spaces, which serves only as publicity, without them being able to determine what to say and how to speak.

4 Abya Yala is the term commonly used by Indigenous Peoples and other groups to refer to the territory denominated as America by Europeans in the late fifteenth century. Abya Yala, in the language of the Kuna people, originally from northern Colombia, means “mature land”, “living land” or “land in bloom”.

5 All interviewees” names were changed to preserve their identity and privacy, especially because many of them are still involved in negotiations with the state’s government. Interview excerpts cited here were translated by the author.

6 In Brazil, the most common type of occupation is “horizontally’ organized, where a group of people occupy a piece of abandoned land, divide it into lots and build their homes. This tactic is largely used by MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, the Landless Rural Workers' Movement in Brazil) and social movements acting in urban peripheries where large empty sites are widespread. In these cases, it is much faster to occupy and build, but it is harder to control who enters and confrontations with the police. Conversely, Vicentão is a “vertical” occupation with only one gate of access (the entrance of the building), which makes it easier to control, yet presents other challenges regarding infrastructures of water and electricity.

Additional information

Funding

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.