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Training course
Spoken Lives, Written Lives
June 25th-26th, 2010, CES Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Coimbra
Registration
Objectives:
Based on several types of material, from documentaries to life stories and fiction works on women’s lives, this course intends to reflect upon the ways of struggle against women silencing and invisibility in different cultural and political contexts (with a special emphasis to Brazil, Palestine, Mozambique and East-Timor)- We intend to talk about stories an self-narratives as ways of constructing subjectivity and a collective memory, as well as empowerment towards action and intervention within the public space.
Keywords: Resistance. Silencing. Subalternity. Violence.
Target Public: Students; teachers; activists; journalists; community in general.
Coordinators: Adriana Bebiano (NECC) and Tatiana Moura (NEP)
Duration: 12 hours
Program
Day 25/06 (Tatiana Moura, Rita Santos, Shahd Wadi, Teresa Cunha)
9.30 – Presentation and Reception of Participants
Coffee-Break
10.00 – Grieving mothers. Testimonies of armed violence victims’ relatives at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Tatiana Moura)
The city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is stage for summary and arbitrary executions perpetrated by State agents. However, to those who experience this drama up close, such facts are not limited to the tragedy of those massacres. Each death brings the pain of those who stay, affecting their social circle, especially family and friends.
The visibility of these deaths and of the trail of pain caused is temporary. The silence is what remains present. The mothers – and, sometimes sisters and wives – are the ones who begin the journey towards justice, in the hope of regaining some sense of what is left and in the attempt, not always successful, of fighting against impunity. Many of those mothers face common adversities: Post-traumatic stress, economic collapse, long legal proceedings under adverse conditions, having to face the murderers or retaliation threats. These are the hidden victims of armed violence, who are not included in violent crime statistics of Rio de Janeiro.
The documentary “Luto como Mãe” will tell the stories of these survivors, mostly women, and their passing ritual from a grieving state to fighting against injustice and invisibility.
12.30 – Lunch
14.00 – War memories and war of memories. Convergences and divergences in women’s pain narratives in Mozambique and East-Timor (Teresa Cunha)
The narratives of women’s pain which emerge from in-depth interviews conducted between 2008 and 2009 in Mozambique and East-Timor lead to a discussion around three issues which this seminar intends to approach and question. Firstly, the argument that women’s pain are proof of their courage, and that, as such, women are national heroines, breaking the masculine and narcissist nationalism that political independences have engraved in the collective memories of both countries. Secondly, this narrative of pain turns into a political value and in a lever for public acknowledgement and legitimacy to decide and govern. Finally, to understand, using the words and corresponding structures of these narratives, some peculiarities and similarities of this process in Mozambique and East-Timor.
16.30 – Coffee Break
16.45 – Narratives of occupied bodies (Shahd Wadi)
Based on life stories – biographic/autobiographic narratives – of Palestinian women, found in studies, literary and cultural products, we will talk about their bodies, how they are used by Israeli occupation, but also how they constitute places of resistance against the occupation and, simultaneously, against a Palestinian patriarchal culture. We question how the bodies of Palestinian women emerge at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as weapons, battle field and target.
Day 26/06
10.00 – Women’s Biographies: Voice and Visibility (Adriana Bebiano)
There are few women present in History; when they appear, it is almost exclusively within the “private” sphere, as mothers, wives or lovers: a passive, secondary role, defined by its relationship with the masculine, "the-sex-that-is" (Ramalho) and by which the other sexual identities are defined. However, in the past years, we have seen an increase of women’s biographies, of different nature – romances, academic studies, or journalistic texts – which give voice and visibility to those women that were before erased from the archive and collective memory.
Based on some short biographic texts, this seminar will reflect on the (possible) reconfigurations of the “feminine” and on the (new) models of practice and behaviour which emerge from these stories. We will favour past female figures who have asserted themselves within the public space as politicians or adventurers, thus working as emancipatory figures for the present.
The reference texts will be contemporary and in Portuguese.
11.30 – Coffee Break
12.30 – Lunch
14.00 – Women and Autobiography: texts that weave lives (Isabel Pedro)
Given the historical marginalization of women’s autobiographical writing, we intend to frame the relatively recent theoretical and critical attention given to the “self writing”, in which women represent themselves in terms of some ideas of difference according to which the position of speech production is mostly considered as transgressing the silence which, traditionally, belongs to the f”feminine”. We will attempt to see the ways in which these texts explore, generally, the fact/fiction opposition and integrate alterity, mobility and temporary as elements of an “exiled” subjectivity, in contrast to autobiographical models based on an idea of unifying and transcendent subjective identity and on the confidence on language referentiality and transparency.
These considerations will be supported by the reading of autobiographic texts from different ages and origins, most of which will be previously provided and, as these texts are written in a foreign language, mostly English, we will try to provide also the corresponding translations.
16.30 – Coffee Break
16.45 – Final Round-Table Discussion:
Coordination: Sílvia Maeso.
118.00 – End of Works
20.00 – Dinner (optional)
Modes of Registration
Limit of participants: 30
Students: 15 participants max. / Regular: 10 participants max.
Researchers / Postgraduate students from CES – free: 5 participants max.
Registration Fees
Regular - 30 euros
Students – 15 euros
Deadline for registration: June 24th
Deadline for payment: June 25th
Modes of payment: Credit card, ATM, cheque, bank transfer
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