Gender Workshop Series VIII Closing Session

Bodies beyond the abyssal line. Feminisms and Epistemologies of the South

June 28, 2018, 17h00

Room 2, CES | Alta

Speakers: Catarina Martins (CES/ FLUC Researcher), Marie Claire de Mattia (PhD Candidate in «Materialities of Literature»), Carla Panico, Eliana  Milagros, Emiliana Marques, Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn, Isabela Lemos, Marco Túlio Carvalho, Maria Mercone, Patricia de Menezes, Rita Pais e Rubéns Solís (PhD Candidates in «Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship»).

This gender workshop session of stems from the collective reading of the novel "Niketche. Uma História de Poligamia", by Paulina Chiziane of Mozambique, to question the concept of the body itself, as presented in this text and in the social and dynamics of power it evokes. We intend to respond to the challenge of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who criticizes modern Western reason as an abyssal reason, which produces the colonized world as non-existent and invalidates the knowledge of these geographies, in view of opening up to the epistemologies of the South, that promote social and cognitive justice  through an ecology of knowledges.

This challenge, however, should be understood as an extension of the concepts advocated by Santos to feminist dimensions that they do not comprise. At the heart of the reflection will be the concept of the body as one of the elements of the central dichotomy of Western modernity thought - the mind/body dichotomy - which also supports the whole edifice of human rights and is axial to the multiple forms of emancipation formulated by feminisms. The literature of African women - of which "Niketche" is an example - points to other knowledges about bodies that elicit new understandings of old and new feminist claims, from contexts and worldviews of the South, as well as different ways of formulating debates around some struggles or conditions of women.

The session will take the form of a workshop, where participants will be invited to reflect on alternative thoughts on feminist bodies and notions, from excerpts of the novel suggested by the session facilitators or participants themselves.

This work was initially developed in the discipline "Post-Colonial Studies in the Portuguese Language Area" of the Doctoral Programme «Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship»

 

Reading Suggestions:
Chiziane, Paulina (2004), Niketche. Uma História de Poligamia. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Tamale, Sylvia (2007), “The Right to Culture and the Culture of Rights: A Critical Perspective on Women’s Sexual Rights in Africa”, in Adili Zia; Billy Kahora (orgs.), Sex Matters. Urgent Action Fund – Africa.

[To access the texts send an email togw@ces.uc.pt]