Women’s Resistance in Violent Settings: Infrapolitical Strategies in Brazil and Colombia

Summary, in English

The reflections compiled in this chapter emerge from the two fieldwork investigations conducted in Brazil (2016) and Colombia (2015). The first one, carried out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, aims to understand and analyse the nature and the impacts of police violence, as well as resistance emerging in that context, based on women’s testimonies. The second one has been implemented with the collaboration of the Colombian Agency for Reintegration and pursued the objective of analysing the narratives of female ex-combatants in order to propose new strategies for the gender approach in reintegration. In both cases, women are confronted with high levels of violence, oppression and forms of marginalisation. However, based on the conceptualisation of resistance and infrapolitics theorised both by decolonial and Black feminist studies (Lugones, 2010, Collins, 2009), Veillette and Avoine argue that in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, survival and motherhood represent the foundations of women’s resistance against police violence. This position, rooted within a complex web of oppressions, allows them to construct spheres of influence and power. In Colombia, demobilised women have developed similar mechanisms to confront the marginalisation they live as ex-combatants: survival strategies, motherhood as a political space, informal work or a conscious appropriation of their femininity.