The Salt of the Earth - with Sebastião Salgado

I knew the 1954 movie Salt of the Earth, about a long strike, in 1961, in Mexico. It is a feminist film, showing women striking to support workers struggle for a better work conditions. The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. It's style is neorealist, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film. It was a great movie that strengthened my radical feminist point of view and my solidarity with workers' movements. 

Miners claimed equal payment and wages with Anglo workers as well as better health programmes for them and their families. Because of the fear of police, the miners' wives replaced them in the strike and stand there firmly into the end. Esperanza Quitero is one of the characters protrayed in the movie, played by Rosaura Revuletas. 
I remembered the circle of women with small posters in their hands, and walking around all the day. Also the solidarity among them and from the neighbours to support with food, medicines and whatever they need to go on striking for so long time. 

Tonight, I saw another The Salt of the Earth, a Brazilian-French and Italian biographical documentary directed by Wim Wenders — the director of Der Himmel über Berlin —, and Sebastião Salgado's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. I knew some of the photographs of Sebastião Salgado but I didn't imagine how much he had worked. The movie received many awards, the Cannes Festival Special Prize and César Award for Best Documentary Film.  In the team of the producers, there is also Wim Wenders, but also Lélia Wanick Salgado, Sebastião's wife, and David Rosier, Julia de Abreu, Fakhrya Fakhry, Andrea Gambetta and Christine Ponelle. 

The movie shows how important his wife was in his career — Lélia Wanick Salgado.



References:
Salt of the Earth (1954) written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. 
Salt of the Earth (2014) written by Wim Wenders, Juliano Salgado and David Rosier, Directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Salgado and produced by Wim Wenders, but also Lélia Wanick Salgado, Sebastião's wife, and David Rosier, Julia de Abreu, Fakhrya Fakhry, Andrea Gambetta and Christine Ponelle.

Writing on feminist and queer movements

Prevention of gender violence and working against LGBT prejudices: the intersection between collective action and institutional dynamics

Fernando André Rosa – ISCTE-IUL, CIES, PT

Maria José Magalhães – FPCEUP-CIIE; CIEG, PT

Yolanda Rodríguez-Castro — UVigo, ES
Rita de Oliveira Braga Lopez — FPCEUP, PT

This study compares two public campaigns against LGBT prejudices: i) “Dislike Homophobic  Bullying”, by CIG, the Portuguese Governmental mechanism for citizenship and gender equality; ii) The performative action "Exorcise the Pathologization", included in the Portuguese branch of the international campaign Stop Trans Patologization 2012. Using critical discourse analysis and visual analysis, we conclude that gender violence is a cross cultural and structural problem embracing a wide range of forms of violence against women and LGBT people in Portugal. It is grounded in a dominant culture where gender is socially constructed as polarized, complemented with the performativity of discourse, the intersectional and institutional power relations underlying social practices. We demonstrate how public campaigns against homo and transphobia can contribute for the des-naturalization of gender divide and gender regime and thus for the change of the cultural ground of gender violence. However, without deconstructing gender they are at risk of reproducing gender hierarchies.

Keywords: Gender violence; homophobic violence; critical visual analysis; feminism; agency, heteronormativity.

Theoretical interpellations: confusions around "gender"

Reading Freitas & Pinheiro (2013) I am questioned by the notions of gender across feminist authorship.
The ways gender seems to stuck people on individual (interaction) relations bypassing the social structures of the gender and patriarchal order seems to concord with the argument of Virginia Ferreira about the useless of the concept of gender.
This slippery concept together with a strict foucaultian perspective on power renders gender as incapable of accounting for the power relations in private sphere between men and women and some analysis slide to wrangles between individuals.
Although affirming a feminist perspective, there is a difficulty to perceive women as a group with less power than men.
On the contrary, Sue Clegg (2006) is particularly clear about the structural relations founded in gender inequalities and the patriarchal order.
I re-read Clegg to gain insights for a comparative paper I am wrestling with and I found it very useful to dialogue with Freitas & Pinheiro. These latter authors present a set of "narratives of violence" extracted from the processual pieces of the charges on gender and domestic violence in Jaraguá, Goiás, within the frame of "Lei Maria da Penha", and analyses them through the concepts of gender and performance (Butler 1990), using critical discourse analysis on juridical texts.

References:
Freitas, Lúcia & Pinheiro, Veralúcia (2013) Violência de Gênero, Linguagem e Direito. Análise de Discurso Crítica em Processos na Lei Maria da Penha, Jundiaí-SP: Paco Editorial.

Clegg, Sue (2006) “The problem of agency in feminism: a critical realist approach”, Gender and Education, 18:3, 309-324, DOI: 10.1080/09540250600667892. 

Learning and Teaching the "Text of Life"

Maria da Conceição Silva Freitas talked with us about "texto da vida".

Working with women "campesinas", Conceição has an educational experience in alphabetization with peasants following Paulo Freire philosophy.

Using texts about the living situations of the community, the student teachers go to the countryside, make contact with the peasant communities and work with them to improve their literacy levels.

These communities are called "assentamentos", that is a community of "assentados" which meaning is an "occupant" of the land.

Interview with Lourdes Bandeira

In her office, I interviewed Lourdes Bandeira about Lei Maria da Penha in Brasil. 

Lourdes Bandeira was the Secretary for Public Policies for Women in the Federal Government of the President Dilma. Author of a large ammount of sociological works, Lourdes Bandeira has been researching about feminism, violence against women in Brasil, and other topics. 

Asked about the evaluation of the impact of Lei Maria da Penha (Lei # 11.340/06), the researcher answered that the Secretary has no money to implement a national evaluation. She added that this law was subjected to a Constitutional Court decision, because some magistrates claimed that it was not constitutional. But in 2012, the Supreme Court decided that Lei Maria da Penha is constitutional and Brazil, and all the 27 states have the obligation to protect women from violence to fulfill the Law. 

Lourdes Bandeira emphasized the dichotomy in the judicial professionals: some are very committed to apply the law, but others are still defending the 'family', using the argument that this kind of violence as a minor offensive potential.

During the interview, the well known feminist researcher and activist shared with us her perspective on femicide and feminicide (feminicídio). For her, feminicide is a type of femicide with cruelty, including desfiguration of the victim and extreme antecipation from the side of the murder. In distinct way, femicide would be a murder in result of an emotional moment.


Reference:
Bandeira, Lourdes (2009) "Três décadas de resistência feminista contra o sexismo e a violência feminina no Brasil, 1976 a 2006", Sociedade e Estado, v. 24, nº2, 401-438, Brasília.

Writing

The process as well the outcome! Am I wondering whether the space is not yet blank (Stronach 2002)? Between writing and riting? The colourful screen where a file waits for the Word that doesn't come. 

Weaving the ideas with words in the fabric of the screen.

Writing in English which is not my mother tongue, makes me feeling as if I went back to the infancy, writing the first compositions in primary school.
Then, when I achieve to get ideas in the paper, to almost catch the "spook" of an idea, my mind waves and maybe I will be able to fly.






Reference:
Stronach, Ian (2002) "This space is not yet blank: anthropologies for a future action research", Educational Action Research, 10:2, 291-308.

Preventing dating violence in schools

Clara Ventura (2015), in a study that included an inquiry about the beliefs to legitimate dating violence and a school-based programe, shows that Portuguese youth still thinks that there are some causes external to the offenders that might justify dating violence. Also the belief of the school as a closed unit, without external "interferences" seems to contribute to justify some violent behaviours of the offenders.

Ventura, Clara (2015) Violência no Namoro: Crenças e Auto conceito nas Relações Sociais de Género. Modelo de Intervenção em enfermagem, Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências de Enfermagem, Porto: ICBAS.