‘The whole process of gender’: a feminist culture of militancy in southern Brazil

Seeing and not seeing

Individual lives and social movements take shape, know and sustain themselves, interact and make impacts by holding multiplicity. Consequently, a sensibility of seeing and simultaneity facilitates our understanding of cultures of militancy. What I call seeing and not seeing means looking squarely at – but also beyond and through – the big things people habitually see and are primed to see, such as institutions, democracies, movements, economies, viruses or borders. By resisting habitual moves to coherence and making boundaries, a seeing and not seeing sensibility works to both see and not see these phenomena so as to identify the multiple processes, forces and representations that occur in, through and around them, out of which they are constituted and amid which they act.¹¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein evoked such a sensibility with his suggestion of foregoing the construction of clearly delineated comparative categories, with the advice that the observer ‘[not] think, but look’. In so doing, one ‘notices an aspect’, a pattern or starting point they have not seen before.¹²

Psychoanalyst Leston Havens observes that ‘the consistency, regularity, almost homogeneity we think we see in people is a product of our need to have one person before us, a whole, habitual creature, when in fact so-called multiple personalities are really only the sharply etched version of what occurs in everyone’.¹³ Havens goes on to describe the approach of the analyst – like that of Wittgenstein’s philosopher or social scientist – as they seek to perceive patterns out of complexity. ‘An evenly suspended attention’, he writes, ‘permits opposites to coexist in the mind . . . I believe it is this unforced mingling that allows fresh combinations to appear and shed their light.’¹⁴

In the course of participant observation and interviews with MMTR activists in Maronata and Andalinas over 15 years, Emma and I sought to ‘suspend attention evenly’, listening and absorbing information as we asked questions, bringing back transcriptions and video material from previous visits and finding stories shifting and deepening through reflection on our renderings of them and on our new questions. Out of this ‘unforced mingling’, we began to perceive paradoxes and tensions that represented key aspects of women’s experiences in the MMTR. These experiences constituted parts of women’s lives; aspects of their biographies that they and we came upon in dialogue.

Six women’s interior experiences of activism

In 2001, Emma and I were present at the state-wide convention where Helena Toneli was asked to continue in a leadership position in the MMTR, but chose instead to accept the position of Secretary of Health in her small town of Andalinas. Helena was a powerhouse, a key and respected leader of the women’s movement who could galvanise hundreds of women with her cry of ‘mulheres!’ (women!). However, the other leaders of the MMTR would not accept her decision to work in government to improve health services as part of a centre-left coalition, and they gradually isolated Helena from being involved in strategising. As a result, Helena felt acutely that she had ‘two hearts’ in tension with one another – one in the streets with the women’s movement and the other in the institutions.

In contrast to Helena’s public and institutional roles, Sandra Lorina spent long days producing milk and cheese on her family farm, holding the paradox as she envisioned a new world through her participation in the women’s movement, while firmly tethered to this one. In our interviews, Sandra constantly toggled back and forth between describing her daily life as it was and setting out convictions and visions completely at odds with ongoing family gender relations. When we talked to Sandra in her kitchen, with her family around her, she told us that she was looking forward to a time when her daughter, Edite, was older and would be able to help her more. ‘It doesn’t need to be girls who help,’ she went on to say. ‘Boys can help too.’ But her boys only listen to their father’s demands for help on the farm, not to their mother’s requests in the house. ‘My husband is tired when he comes home from work,’ Sandra added. ‘He likes to sit on the couch and watch TV. That’s his place.’ She motioned to her husband, who was leaning back, legs crossed and arms slung over the back of the couch. He cocked his head at us, grinned, raised an eyebrow and nodded in agreement.

A different mindset, a relatively egalitarian marriage and greater economic resources enabled Andréia Fornato, the farmers’ union president, to foster more congruence between her political and social vision and her daily life. Consequently, Andréia left the women’s movement when it adopted hierarchical decision-making practices and allied formally with the MST and its international ally, Vía Campesina. But Andréia mourned the loss of the movement as a source of inspiration and guidance – a fountain she needed – as she struggled with the meanings of power and of gender in family life and radical politics. Andréia wanted to be a steward of power, rather than a leader who divides up power and uses it as their own. Power, Andréia said, ‘has to be understood as a space to speak and grow for a whole movement, not for me as an individual’.

When Cristiele Morolla went door to door in her tiny rural community to convince women to join the women’s movement, she encountered numerous obstacles, from religious convictions, to faith in pop psychology, to the men’s refusals to reconsider the safety of pesticides or to use condoms in the face of evidence of chemical toxicity and the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. In this, her organising experiences paralleled those of Isabel Toneli. Cristiele dealt with the slowness of her organising work and the resistance she faced from women by gradually recognising how much there is working against women in the movement and confusing and complicating what they see to be true, and she takes this recognition as her guide. ‘We know the world, and we read the world,’ Cristiele told me, ‘and things go on from there.’

Isabel Toneli and Nara Saroni were emboldened to live publicly as a lesbian couple and move in together in their small Catholic town because of their immersion in the women’s movement and the support for voice and autonomy – for subjecthood – it fostered. Years later however, they found that there was no place – in the movement they had co-created with others to form a space for women’s speech – for them to talk about their relationship and they left the movement. It was difficult to discuss their relationship in their family and town too, although they continued to live in the small house next door to Isabel’s sister and her family, participating in a robust collective life as they experienced the paradox of silence amid speech.

The intimate experiences of these six activists suggest new categories for scholarly analysis and leftist practice in the final years of the Cold War and in the twenty-first century. To understand what these women negotiate as activists, and to support women in those processes, means recognising that choosing activist strategies may engage multiple hearts and involve holding paradoxes on a daily basis and may include suffering in silence in spaces dedicated to breaking silence or, as Isabel described it, finding some kinds of speech closed down at the moment that others open up. Activists may seek power as a space to be shared, rather than as a resource to be gathered and wielded, and they may read the world as they go, literally and metaphorically door to door, reaching only provisional analyses as they proceed. Andréia perhaps illustrated this provisionality when she struggled to show us the cassava, which grows contingently, taking unpredictable forms, subject to context and conditions. What might a left that acknowledges and builds on the sentiments expressed by these six women and the underlying pressures to which their emotions give voice look like? Through what processes and in what locations has such a left taken shape or been glimpsed?

Encounters: from vanguardism to multiplicity

Historians of the 1960s Jeffrey Gould¹⁵ and Eric Zolov¹⁶ observe that both the Communist Party left of the early and mid-twentieth century and the Che-inspired New Left of the 1960s based their organising on male vanguards tasked with discerning and pursuing the most effective revolutionary strategies. Literary critics María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo¹⁷ and Diane Sorensen¹⁸ find that the masculine and vanguardist underpinnings of such approaches wrote out difference, first incorporating and then purging feminine identities and practices. In Saldaña-Portillo’s words:

Guevara’s representation of revolutionary transformation ‘leaves behind’ a previously immature, complicit consciousness for a fully formed, collective one, resembling a model of development that ‘leaves behind’ premodern forms of subjectivity and agency for thoroughly modern ones. Both models invariably ‘leave behind’ the ethnic particularity of indigenous or peasant subjectivity, while carrying forward a racialized and masculinist understanding of fully modern, revolutionary agency.

¹⁹

In Sorensen’s analysis, this occurred in the context of a sexualising of power that made revolutionary leaders ‘not only the repository of superior male humanness, but also capable of inspiring intensity of feeling that reverberates through the body politic’.²⁰

Sorensen discerns a different vision of political activism in the reportage of Mexican journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska on the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco.²¹ In Poniatowska’s representation of one of the paradigmatic repressions of the 1960s and early 1970s, which led directly to the formation of Mexico’s foco-driven, clandestine left, Sorensen finds:

a deliberate attempt to explode unity and to relinquish a totalizing vision while ushering in a disparate group of witnesses whose testimony configures a mosaic of splintered pieces. By allowing different voices to speak, she [observer/author Poniatowska] constructs ... a decentered representation of community anchored in plurality.

²²

The reader of Poniatowska’s text, which she produced by piecing together tape-recorded interviews, ‘is immersed in the microstories of the everyday experience of ’68, as if through fragmentation and polyphony it became possible to reconstruct the meanings of politics in everyday life’.²³

Poniatowska’s text anticipated a sea change in the politics of the radical left in Latin America, one apparent two decades later in the culture of militancy of some members of the MMTR, with their emphasis on subjecthood and dialogue.²⁴ Poniatowska perceived and recognised multiple voices in an event that could have been told monolithically as one of the founding repressions of 1968 and the ensuing decade.²⁵ Andréia, too, created her political vision from a ‘mosaic of splintered pieces’, including family and community experiences, the provocations of liberation theology priests and nuns, a ferment of social-movement activism in the final years of military dictatorship and feminist insights circulating between urban sites and the countryside. And Andréia, like Poniatowska herself, did not reduce these experiences to a totalising vision; rather, she infused radicalism with agency and emotion. Drawing on these approaches, I hope to produce something similar in this article: a mosaic of splintered pieces, from a disparate group of witnesses, to represent a community anchored in plurality.

While the 1970s is widely perceived as a decade of military repression and the literal ‘disappearance’ of the left,²⁶ the origins of a more plural, and indeed more democratic, practice of leftist politics can also be located in the experiences and innovations of grassroots encounters during the same and subsequent decades – among radical priests, Indigenous people, feminists and workers – in the jungles and shantytowns of Mexico and Brazil, as well as numerous other locations. The visions and practices developed in these encounters prefigured, indeed hammered out, new forms of leftist subjecthood and practice in the Americas. It is through this lens that I view the organising and meetings of the MMTR, and I will recount some of those experiences of encounter and innovation here.

This innovation developed, for example, with the turn to ethnicity and elections that occurred in the 1970s in the southern Mexican city of Juchitán, where radical Zapotec students encountered their own pueblo (people) and past to produce a visionary politics that diverged sharply from the rest of the Latin American left.²⁷ Rather than reject Indigeneity as premodern, to be replaced with the identity of campesino (peasant), as much of the Latin American left was doing at the time, the Juchiteco students fused the Zapotec cultural practices among which they lived, long shaped in part by Zapotec elites, with a class-based movement of Indios (Indigenous people). And they furthered that Indigenous movement by competing in elections for municipal and then state-wide office, a practice rejected by virtually all of the Mexican grassroots Left at the time,²⁸ but reflective of electoral competition locally as it had evolved in the course of the twentieth century. In that way, they saw beyond the prevalent class-based analysis of their time to envision, as the MMTR leaders did, new forms of subjecthood and political practice.

Pivotal moments in the development of a religiously infused subjecthood, as well as the rejection of vanguardism, occurred among Mayan Indians in the Lacandón jungle of Chiapas and among residents of the shantytowns of São Paulo, Brazil. In the new settlements of the 1970s in the Lacandón jungle, priests influenced by liberation theology came together with Indigenous Maya setting up new communities and with clandestine leftists who had left Mexico City after the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco (described by Poniatowska) to start a revolution in the countryside.²⁹ The Zapatistas, in their theories and in the fierce contestation that occurred among different Mayan groups on the ground before and after the 1994 rebellion,³⁰ navigated a world of both pluralism and fragmentation, and struggled to develop and implement a politics that balanced dialogue and unanimity in productive ways. At much the same time, MMTR activists grappled with how to navigate disagreement, some of them choosing hierarchy and unanimity, others reaching for dialogue and multiplicity.

In the 1970s in São Paulo, liberation theology priests encountered women in mother’s clubs on the urban periphery as well as metalworkers in the city’s steel and automobile industries. Members of each of these groups began to play multiple roles, as priests ejected the ‘charity ladies’ and worked with women to create new kinds of mother’s clubs, along with organisations to protest the cost of living, and members of Christian base communities ran for office in union elections.³¹ The interactions of priests, workers and shantytown dwellers – again a diversity of groups – produced movements for economic rights, internally democratic industrial unions and ultimately the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT), which insisted ‘on a different view of what democracy should mean in Brazil’.³² Furthermore, the union leaders and the massive strike waves they led in 1978 and 1979 created a new, more equal relationship between workers and leftist intellectuals and politicians, as workers ‘were no longer willing to leave the act of interpretation for others’.³³ The women of the MMTR distanced the movement from the Church when the very priests who had encouraged the women sought to limit the reach of their activism; they too were no longer willing to leave the act of interpretation to others.

During the same time, middle-class feminists encountered working-class women on the periphery of São Paulo³⁴ and subsequently in the hemisphere-wide encuentros (meetings) that shaped Latin American feminist movements.³⁵ These encounters also included women returning from exile, having interacted with European and US feminisms. In the new spaces created initially by the Church and the economic movements, poor and dark-skinned women on the urban periphery turned the expectations of largely white, middle-class feminists on their heads by speaking about gender relations in families, health and women’s bodies, and sexuality, topics that middle-class feminists had thought would be taboo in poor neighbourhoods. ‘Feminist political practice, then, gave rise to new, inductively derived, theoretical insights’,³⁶ as women took new positions in the formation of the Workers’ Party, the debate about the Brazilian constitution and government policies on daycare and women’s health. In a similar way, MMTR activists played key roles in political party debates and electoral strategising, as well as in municipal government and the development of alternative, organic agricultural models.

Encounters among different individuals, groups and political theories, which occurred in jungles, shantytowns and union halls, thus transformed leftist analysis and practice from the 1970s to the 1990s. These encounters rethought the nature of Indigeneity in modernity and protest, assimilated elections as focal points for radicalism, built radicalism from lived religion and new religious theorising, repeatedly rejected vanguardism, stimulated a wide range of activists to try out different roles in fostering social change and challenged and revised leftist and feminist orthodoxies by heeding people’s day-to-day experiences and convictions. As young women in southern Brazil encountered conduits of these ideas and experiences – in the form of liberation theology priests, Workers’ Party activists and urban feminist advisers – they engaged with all of these ideas. Some of the women took them up with gusto.

The history of the MMTR

A feminist and democratic culture of militancy

The MMTR, like the innovative encounters in the last two decades of the Cold War described above, grew out of the unusual alliance of different political and social actors, such as nuns and priests, union reformers, radical leftists, feminists and young women, in union halls, church meeting rooms and marches and demonstrations in the countryside and in the state capital. The personal, interior experiences described in the section ‘Six women’s interior experiences of activism’ in this article, together with the meetings described above, shaped the culture of militancy of the women activists in Andalinas and Maronata in ways that make it both feminist and democratic. This section will examine this culture of militancy directly, through the ways in which women themselves understood and held their experiences. In their examinations of subjecthood, decision-making, power and the emotions and capabilities of being a movement, the activists in Maronata and Andalinas like Andréia, Vanessa, Isabel, Helena and Jussara help us to see issues and tensions that arose in earlier, clandestine movements of the Cold War period in a new light. They challenge masculinist and vanguardist approaches by asking, ‘How do you know and how do you decide?’ They problematise tensions between activism in the streets and the institutions by asking, ‘Where do you act?’ And they radically re-formed gender roles by asking, ‘Who acts and how?’ As this section will show, the life histories of particular women make visible the forms of tension and holding that constitute this culture of militancy.

In talking about their lives, these women combined understandings of selfhood and collective politics. Vanessa Saltara equated leaving home and entering the space of movement meetings as the beginning of thinking for herself. For Vanessa, the women’s movement was a place of education, like a university, and a pathway for women, both individually and collectively, to occupy new spaces in society. She and others credited the movement’s campaign to secure documents for rural women as a source of happiness in two senses: in having their existence recognised and as a basis for legal rights. At women’s movement meetings, information – plentiful, often unfiltered and contradictory, provided at times for hours on end – was presented and received. In our interviews, Andréia spoke of pleasure, of a right and desire to take pleasure in her life, of the fact that she was an activist, among other reasons, ‘por gusto’ (for the love of it). Andréia also recounted her combined determination and patience to achieve the position of first woman president of the Maronata farmers’ union, once accepting being pushed aside and biding her time, but then insisting on taking her turn the next time. When she talked about heading the union, which she characterised as a male space, she described doing it in a ‘woman’s way’. Isabel and Nara said that it was the space of voice and acceptance created by the women’s movement that led them to act on their attraction to each other and move in together. Cristiele explained how the movement functioned for her like the turning on of a light switch, leading her to return to the countryside to embrace sustainable agriculture and continue organising for the women’s movement. As she undertook this work, she shared household tasks with her husband, who for his part did not believe that men should be waited on by women.

These are all statements about selfhood and collective politics, the way one shapes the other. As Sorensen observed in her analysis of Poniatowska’s texts: ‘through fragmentation and polyphony it became possible to reconstruct the meanings of politics in everyday life’.⁴⁶ This sense of self-in-formation came out of the women’s family histories. The young women’s sense of themselves grew out of their fathers’ work to make local unions genuinely representative of farmers’ interests, rather than instruments of government control, even as they ran their households in an authoritarian fashion, and out of their mothers’ capacities to withstand silencing and later join their daughters in protest marches for women’s economic rights. It grew from having to fight to leave the house to attend meetings but leaving, nonetheless. In ways to which I gained access only indirectly, the women’s parents appear to have nurtured their daughters’ independence, albeit in constraining ways. At least, they raised daughters who could assume independence as the world changed around them and who could not only leave – walk down the road in the rain to attend a women’s movement meeting – but return. The Church deepened and made this subjecthood explicit by bringing individual young people into the youth pastoral work and taking them to see and then theorise the world around them, as they were taught to understand themselves as subjects. The liberation theology priests and nuns were teachers and advisers who accompanied the movements but did not generally seek to determine their paths, in a recognition of collective subjecthood. (When priests did seek to constrain MMTR actions, the women stuck to their own decisions.)

This rootedness of local politics in personal and collective biographies made the splits in the movement, which arose in the late 1990s and early 2000s, all the more confounding to MMTR activists. Between 2002 and 2004, after the women’s movement headquarters had formally allied with the MST and Vía Campesina, Andréia and Vanessa spoke to me about their uncertainty over whether and how to wage a battle within the women’s movement to ‘take it back’, by which they meant bringing the movement back under the control of women committed to its autonomy and to holding multiple ideological and strategic positions within one movement. One of the early advisers to the movement, a priest and educator, worked with them to formulate pathways by which Vanessa, Andréia and other founding members of the women’s movement might do this, either through dialogue and elections to leadership positions within the movement, or by negotiating an explicit space for women’s activism within the farmers’ union.⁴⁷

It was in discussing the need to reclaim the movement – an effort that never took place – that Vanessa’s and Andréia’s democratic commitments became clearer. Each of them wanted more planning to occur at the municipal level, closer to women’s day-to-day lives, rather than primarily in the state headquarters, which was linked in turn to national and international movements and subject to their priorities. Each of them wanted the women’s movement to support both Vía Campesina, the international peasant movement, and the less radical, locally rooted farmers’ unions. Vanessa wanted ‘mutual support’, but the women’s movement’s current leaders, she observed, never supported the unions. Vanessa and her husband Alessandro’s support for the unions grew out of their lives as farmers who needed to work the land and milk the cows daily and who had grown up in their small towns. Their affiliations and schedules differed from those of MST supporters, many of whom lived in acampamentos (encampments), pressuring and waiting for land expropriations to be carried out and to construct new communities on the redistributed land. ‘The difference’ – in the availability for and the tactics of protest – ‘lies in the manner of working.’ It was also the case that the difference lay in competing political theories and visions. Should moving forward collectively mean fighting for the reform of existing institutions – such as negotiations carried out by farmers’ unions – or a radical break with these institutions – through actions like illegal land occupations? In practice, there were overlaps in these pathways, in commitments to organic agriculture, relations with government ministries and programmes and daily agricultural work. But activists did not find a way to use these commonalities to bridge the competing strategies and goals that divided them. Furthermore, as Alessandro said, ‘Vía Campesina has a very authoritarian way of running things’, which is how many local activists experienced the global movement.

Vanessa defined democracy for those who disagree in this way: ‘Everyone has time and voice [vez e voz], to be able to decide together, to find an alternative.’ The Portuguese ‘vez e voz’ might also be translated as the opportunity to speak, although that does not capture the space and subjectivity Vanessa considers essential to democracy:

What is lacking for us is to sit down and converse. Because in truth, we are not being democratic, we need to sit at the table and put out there for everyone what is happening. They set out their problems and we ours, and we reach an agreement.

For Andréia, this would have meant making sure that the women’s movement had its own goals and struggle. From that position:

depending on the strategies developing in particular moments, you ally with Vía Campesina, or with [the unions]. I don’t think the women’s movement needs to be always with one or the other, but rather to decide, at particular moments, what would best serve the goals of the women in the movement.

The women who gained the upper hand in the women’s movement leadership in the late 1990s and 2000s rejected this sort of autonomy in the interests of forging a unified, national leftist peasant movement whose central leaders could make strategic decisions that would be followed by affiliated organisations, both in moments of crisis and for the long haul. These leaders also rejected participating ‘in the institutions’, by which they meant the official political and administrative organisations of government, like political parties, elected offices, ministries and departments. Similarly, under ‘institutions’ they included the daily tasks and leadership roles of unions, because of the unions’ reformism and their origins in government policy and in law, as well as their formal recognition by state authorities. The leaders of the women’s movement rejected these forms of participation out of the conviction that positions in government would absorb and co-opt activists and weaken radical goals, a process that arguably occurred in the course of the presidencies of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, each from the Workers’ Party.

Exploring the implications of this view, in 2007 I pressed two leaders at the women’s movement headquarters in Ralindo on the question of what Andréia calls ‘autonomy’ and Helena ‘flexibility’. Elisabete, a nun, had long been involved with the women’s movement and Janaína remembered taking notes for her mother at movement meetings when she was a child. Janaína had also studied political analysis and leadership at an MST school. My feeling that I could pose this question to them, and their offering of a frank answer, represented a level of trust that it had taken years to build with leaders in the women’s movement headquarters. Just before this conversation, Emma and I had shared with Elisabete and Janaína video, photographs and text showing the curriculum we had developed for US classrooms on the MMTR, based on interviews we had done in 2004. We also talked about one of the early leaders of the movement whom Emma and I had interviewed and incorporated into the curriculum and who had recently passed away.

In posing my question about autonomy, I listed the many women we had interviewed who were no longer active in the state-wide movement, even though they continued to support movement initiatives and other women’s campaigns in their towns. Each of these women, including Andréia, Vanessa, Helena and Jussara, had opted for the institutions in one way or another, taking leadership roles in unions or local governments, at the same time that the leaders of the women’s movement had chosen to ally with the MST and Vía Campesina, with their emphasis on protest in the streets and centralised decision-making.⁴⁸ More than once, Emma and I were shown photo albums filled with snapshots of many of the women we knew, all together at weddings, baptisms, graduations and protests. Now they gained news of one another from a distance and acknowledged this with nostalgia and a deep sense of loss.

Elisabete and Janaína explained that to believe in unions and local governments is a very different thing from believing in a project of radical social change. ‘And if you understand that,’ Janaína went on, ‘then you understand that you have to make a choice.’ In response, I said, ‘It sounds like you were willing to lose key leaders so that you could join with a larger and more radical political project.’ Janaína agreed: ‘It’s about what’s fundamental, the character of the movement.’ Janaína and Elisabete went on to acknowledge that women didn’t just leave the MMTR for personal reasons owing to their life trajectories, as had often been claimed but were forced out in various ways and that the decision for the women’s movement to join Vía Campesina was a political one that had both benefits and real losses. In saying this, the two women put into words something that had long been understood by the women who had been pushed out but left largely unacknowledged.

The method of making decisions and exercising power that Janaína and Elisabete described reflects the stances of the older, vanguard left in Brazil and Latin America and the conviction on the part of past leftist militants that the leaders of a movement were those best suited to discern the pathways for radical change. While this might well involve ongoing communication with a movement’s base, with shifts in strategy resulting from this communication, effective political struggle meant the leadership’s discerning and enforcing a unified viewpoint and strategy. Furthermore, communication with the base could become increasingly difficult as activists faced repression, clandestinity and exile. Historian James Green, in his biography of the leftist militant Herbert Daniel and the clandestine left in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, locates the origins of this position in the activism and theorising of Che Guevara and Régis Debray, which electrified young Brazilian activists in those decades and spurred them to ‘overcome their social backgrounds’ to advance a centralised struggle.⁴⁹

Andréia, the union president who had introduced us to her garden, embraced and learned from her social background in a way that led her to understand power differently. She regretted having allowed herself to be pressured to leave the women’s movement leadership. ‘I don’t know why I left, why I didn’t fight back,’ Andréia told me in the union hall. ‘I didn’t see what was coming, and I didn’t know how to make the right arguments. So I opted to leave.’ But despite her success in leading the farmers’ union, Andréia saw how much women needed the space of a women’s movement. ‘So what will we do?’ she wondered. ‘We are the MMTR, so why do we have to create another women’s movement? Why isn’t this one ours?’ Two years later, having experienced more of the successes of leading the union and the costs of no longer being part of a movement, Andréia went further: ‘I should have fought back. Other women would have supported me. The movement is ours too.’

Andréia knows that political power, like women’s power in their families, has to be understood and handled with care. In her personal life, she refused her mother’s submissiveness and her father’s linking of domination at home to progressive politics outside. Still, she stayed in her home town and fashioned a different life for herself as an activist. Andréia’s husband respected her political work and shared her goals, and they brought their sons up with a new openness about gender roles. In politics, Andréia insisted on the value of individual voices and democratic decision-making. She opposed the MST because of its rejection of institutional paths to political change and because, as she saw it, decisions were made by (male) leaders and then handed down to everyone else.

‘What is power, and how do you exercise it?’ Andréia wondered. In her view, the leaders of movements that are run from the centre want to divide up power and use it as their own, to command others. But she wanted to be a steward of power: ‘I can’t be in the same place forever. Other people are going to come to take my place. And power too, it has to be understood as a space to speak and grow for a whole movement, not for me as an individual.’ This understanding of power reflects what was learned in the jungles and shantytowns in the 1970s and 1980s, then spread widely via liberation theology priests and nuns, academics and political advisers to social movements, urban feminist movements and non-governmental organisations and activists in new leftist political parties. All of these groups interacted with the activists in the women’s movement from the mid-1980s onwards. These interactions fostered a fundamental shift in the militant cultures of Latin America’s left, a shift that developed out of experiences of encounter and translation, as described in the section ‘Encounters: from vanguardism to multiplicity’ above.

Years after she broke with the state-level women’s movement, Andréia expressed deep nostalgia for the way in which the movement had served as inspiration and guide. ‘We women need a source for clear thinking, and for us the movement was that source,’ she explained. ‘And today we don’t have that anymore.’ Without the movement in her life, Andréia observed, she finds herself taking missteps or compromising when she should stand firm. ‘Because the questions in our lives are so profound that you need constantly to be analysing and rethinking them, or in an instant you find yourself doing things that just a short while ago you wouldn’t have done.’

There is both certainty and uncertainty in Andréia’s conception of power. She knows what power should not be, in terms of centralised authority and the exclusion of voices. She knows as well that what power is, how it is held and what it is used for is worked out in process, on the ground. And she knows that power is shaped, in Anisia’s words, by ‘the whole process of gender’. These conceptualisations of power come out of occupying a place or position temporarily, making the very notion of position fluid and contested. To engage in this working out of power, one needs the openness and creativity of being a movement, which animated the early years of the MMTR. For Andréia, as for other women, the MMTR at that time was a source – a spring or fountain – that nourished them, provided them with ideas and guided them. It was this collective spring, the result of having forged collective action together, that provided ongoing nourishment, not a particular theory or reading of political circumstances alone.

Helena, too, expressed uncertainties at the core of activism, inherent in her two hearts. At an International Women’s Day meeting in the state capital of Porto Alegre in 2002, women from several different rural social movements gathered – after the day-long lectures on the Brazilian economy, with women holding on to the microphone to tell their stories and the pageantry of socialism as a paradise of harmony with nature. Olivio Dutra, the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul at the time, arrived to address the gathering in the enormous gym, ringed on the inside by the concrete bleachers where the women rested and slept, and on the outside by the tents where they cooked and ate and gossiped. At this moment, Helena introduced the governor simply: ‘We need to move forward so that the state will fulfil its promises, so that social movements will achieve their place and know where power is, and so that gender will be taken seriously and be more than a discourse.’ This eloquent introduction at the centre of a highly orchestrated meeting spoke of Helena’s skill, the same skill she had used to impress priests with her diplomacy in the youth pastoral work many years before. She placed before the governor the essence of the women’s movement’s hopes and demands.

But when I thought about it later, I realised that these remarks struck a surprisingly open-ended note. What is the place of social movements, and where is power? Helena, like Andréia, knows how complicated and dangerous power can be. She knows that as a leader of the women’s movement she supported the majority view and the ousting of others and that she, in turn, was marginalised by the movement’s other leaders when she opted to run the health department and work within the institutions. Now Helena agrees with Andréia that there shouldn’t only have to be one viewpoint in a movement, that there should be what she has come to call flexibility.

Andréia calls it autonomy and connects it to the sense of self the MMTR fought to develop in women since its inception, what she calls o meu eu (my I). Andréia left the women’s movement the moment she felt that self to be denigrated, though now she thinks she ought to have fought back to make a place for voice and dissent. By the mid-2000s, the possibility of one women’s movement containing multiple women, projects, views and strategies was gone. But by then as well, many women could envision a flexible kind of movement, a movement of deeply connected yet autonomous individuals, some of them doing battle within the institutions of Brazil’s democracy, in the health departments and schools, the city councils and town halls and the political parties and electoral commissions, and others outside of them, in the neighbourhoods, in the land occupations and the Pilgrimages for the Land, outside the doors of government offices, in the alternative pharmacies and on the streets. One women’s movement holding and enabling different viewpoints, strategies and emotions.⁵⁰

And what happens when gender moves beyond discourse, when challenging the practices resulting from gender inequalities moves to the centre of politics and daily life, as Helena suggested to the governor? Like Cristiele and Isabel and the women at the pharmacy, Helena knows how hard it is to go door to door, literally and figuratively, to try and convince women to see the world in a new way. She has seen over the years how hard it is to change men’s attitudes and beliefs, their refusals and acts of violence. She also knows that at particular moments, dramatic public mobilisations can press legislators to turn women’s economic needs into legal rights. Like Andréia, Helena knows that she’s not sure what she means when she imagines a future without the constraints of gender – who would people be? – though she is sure that women should have a voice and the power to make decisions in every domain of their lives. And, like the women in the pharmacy, Helena knows the pain and hardship of women’s daily lives, the intractability of gender roles inside women themselves and all around them, and the reality of hard-won change.

Helena and the women in the rural women’s movement are fighting for more than rights in any conventional sense. Bringing gender to the centre of politics – embodying, seeing and not seeing, ‘the whole process of gender’ – means you have to grapple day in and day out with what it means to change – and fail to change – those you know and love. If you stay in your home town and fight for equality and a voice for women, you are fighting to redeem the past as much as to create the future, to reach what might have been and might yet be.⁵¹ In her lifelong commitment to luta, Helena is fighting – in encounters in church basements and union halls, among local women interacting with outsiders – for a better way of living she can’t define and a way of holding power she has not experienced.

In our interviews with them, conducted mostly in 2002, 2004 and 2007, but spanning the period from 1997 to 2018, the women’s movement activists in Maronata and Andalinas expressed uncertainty about gender and power and wondered aloud about choices they’d made regarding the MMTR. Reflective about these choices, they recognised the ambiguities with which they grappled in choosing to form a movement as a path for radical change. Isabel and Nara, who had moved in together as a lesbian couple, identified these ambiguities in the silence of not only others in the movement, but also family members. While they lived together openly, their repeated efforts to get the movement’s newsletter to discuss lesbianism brought no response. When they spoke about their experiences as a lesbian couple with family members, they were met with openness but found that silence closed in around them immediately afterwards. It was up to them to break the silence again if they wanted to continue the conversation.

In discussing the day-to-day process of organising, of speaking with women in their houses and workplaces about the weight and danger of gender inequality, Cristiele and Isabel were frank about the contradictions of gender and power they were up against, even as they could not quite understand them. They related, with both distress and humour, women’s attachment to the prescriptions of a male god, so that they distanced themselves from Isabel, who did not hold these religious convictions. They described women who understood the dangers of pesticide use and who opposed the cultivation of genetically altered crops but then turned away from the women’s movement when their husbands refused to budge on these issues. Cristiele and Isabel recognised the appeal of self-help experts who focused on using inner resources to foster happiness, even though for the two of them, the cause of many household difficulties came down to the price of milk.

When I first heard Cristiele and Isabel describe and laugh about these ambiguities and seem to mock women’s acceptance of ‘irrational’ constraints and self-help strategies, I thought it demonstrated a lack of empathy and imagination. Over time, though, I realised that they knew exactly what they were up against; in Cristiele’s words, ‘We know the world, and we read the world, and things go on from there.’ Furthermore, in reading the world, they simultaneously distanced and did not distance themselves from ordinary women in the movement and in their towns. Women’s movement leaders in Maronata and Andalinas ran the health department, where they attended to individual women’s needs daily; they established a shop, right in the centre of town, where they sold organic fruit and vegetables and other products produced by the women themselves; they visited and talked with farm families for union campaigns; and they worked cleaning houses and in agricultural processing plants with other women to support themselves.

In their conversations with us, as in their closeness to women’s daily lives, leaders of the MMTR recognised complex and knotty places of pain, oppression and shame and the way these experiences and emotions entered into activism. It wasn’t just that these experiences constrained activism, but rather that they were the stuff of people’s lives, of their subjecthood. And recognising and knowing this subjecthood – deeply, in its places of complexity and repetition – underscored, for these women, the necessity of a politics that was feminist and democratic. So that if Sandra could not unravel the gender constraints of her marriage and family – or leave her physically abusive husband – the movement would hold Sandra. Movement activists fostered her capacities as a leader and helped her to get her husband to AA rather than condemn or ostracise her for weakness or some sort of hypocrisy in not being able to put her past behind her. And in a meeting in Andalinas, the activists would not only grapple with what a feminist practice of self-care might look like, teaching and re-teaching 300 women about recognising stress and finding space in daily life for conversation; they would also create small groups in the larger room where women could attempt to put into words the abyss of silence, pain and death that they usually confronted alone on their farms and in their families.

In the end, the women’s movement activists in Maronata and Andalinas focused on dialogue as a goal, not just a process. In a discussion that followed skits at a women’s pharmacy workshop, many of the women said that there wasn’t dialogue in their families today. ‘Dialogue’, Lisete observed, ‘is when people make exchanges; I say what I think and you say what you think.’ ‘That can be a negative thing,’ Fátima countered, ‘if we disagree.’ ‘That’s okay,’ Lisete answered. ‘Discussion isn’t always calm, there can be arguments.’ ‘We have to experiment with dialogue in our own families,’ another woman suggested, leading Terezinha, the facilitator, to add, ‘It’s not easy to know what dialogue is, you have to learn it as you get older.’ Listening to these observations about dialogue, I realised that when women in the movement think about challenging submission and silencing, they envision not only equality or independence, but also dialogue.

To gain a voice and exercise that voice through dialogue, to work out what words to say to negotiate with your husband about leaving the house and to hammer out a common strategy in a women’s movement filled with strong and principled disagreement, these were daunting tasks for women in the movement. In the women’s pharmacies they pioneered, the activists spoke a language of radical analysis and compassionate care, articulated through herbs, massage and dialogue. In their discussions of autonomy and power, they recognised and grieved for their own inability to hold onto or reclaim their place in the formal movement. These women, indeed, read the world and acted, individually and collectively, in ways that were necessarily partial and uneven. The early years of women’s movement organising took place during Brazil’s transition to democracy, with the significant, if uneven, protections for assembly, speech and protest that afforded. The movement’s big early successes .in securing pensions, documents and maternity leave gave way to multiple locations of activism in complex institutional and direct-action spaces. Political and movement relationships splintered and families and farms demanded attention and financial resources. In women’s movement meetings and in their personal lives, activists experimented with dialogue, internally and with others, step by step over the years, uneasily grappling with gender-based inequality and harm.

These are the provisional positions of democracy and feminism. In this context, the women in Maronata and Andalinas, and other locations of women’s movement activism in the region, developed a culture of militancy that came to involve taking stock, exercising power with an awareness of others and sharing it, drawing on a spring rather than a dogmatic political theory and building uncertainty, and self-awareness and irony, into their fervently held positions.⁵² Their rootedness in place, with its connections to swirling currents of liberation theology and leftist organising, enabled the young women to create a movement that served in its early years as a space for experimentation, inspiration and guidance. Two decades later, the same grounding in daily life, even as it sensitised them to the ambiguities of existing social relations and emotions, rendered them too engaged in multiple arenas – from unions to health departments to women’s pharmacies, from families to farms to schooling and jobs – to fight to take back the movement and make it autonomous. Yet their struggles and successes, along with their understanding of limits and alternative possibilities, remain supremely relevant to the present, in times of Covid-19 and resurgent authoritarianism in democracies, as activists and leftist governments seek new ways to balance subjecthood and mobilisation and to engage with and transform the broader societies of which they are a part.

Research ethics statement

The author conducted the research reported in this article in accordance with ethnographic field research standards.

Consent for publication statement

The author declares that research participants’ informed consent to publication of findings – including photos, videos, and any personal or identifiable information – was secured prior to publication. The interviews from which the article draws most heavily took place in 2002 and 2004 in Maronata, Andalinas and Ralindo. Unless otherwise stated, quotes in the article come from these two sets of interviews, which were conducted jointly by my daughter Emma Sokoloff-Rubin and myself.

Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.