“É coco, é coco, cocá, o melhor do coco é quebrar!”: processos de subjetivação de mulheres quebradeiras de coco no Piauí

Abstract

The objective of this study was to map subjectivation processes of female Babassu Coconut breakers from Piauí in their way of life and fights with the Interstate Movement of Babassu Breakers (MIQCB). It is a qualitative research, oriented by the ethical-aesthetic-political perspective of Cartography, operating with conceptions from the Philosophy of Difference concept-toolbox. The study was carried out by immersion in three rural communities in Esperantina, where the Piauí regional headquarters of the MIQCB is located, and which has groups of women who break coconuts. In addition to the monitoring of daily living activities, we used as resources the production of narratives and photographs, made by the coconut breakers, that connected to their way of life. These photos were subsequently used as analytical objects in collective conversations with the research participants. The analysis generated three axes: the first one recovers life trajectories of those women and the context of oppression and violence in which they lived, as well as their resistance movements, making the conditions of creation of the MIQCB emerge; in the second one we draw some problematizations around the “coconut breaker” identity, forged in a political game of claiming rights; and the third one concerns subjective effects produced by political action along with the MIQCB. This last one unfolds in three blocks of discussion, being the first one related to tensions in the normative logic that defines the places socially occupied by women; the second block regains friendship in its political potential of resisting and producing counter-conducts; and the last one deals with the resonances of the subjectivation mode “self-entrepreneur” in women’s way of life and current challenges and resistances. Finally, we bet on the power of the common and the transversal struggles as resistance of the women Coconut breakers with the MIQCB, signaling an opening of approach with other social movements, in order to try to escape the neoliberal rationality.