Corpo a corpo com a marcha: feminismos e marcha das vadias em Campina Grande.

Abstract

Slutwalk is a feminist movement that started in 2011 in Toronto, Canada, and has now spread around the world, including in cities throughout Brazil. The general model of promoting this, via social media networks, is used in Campina Grande, and includes general agendas, like women‟s rights to their own bodies and the challenging of violence suffered by women, but it also tackles regional questions, like the #somos todas(os) mulheres de Queimadas campaign. Slutwalk brings in its essence the human body as a stage and as a political weapon. The body is seen, not just as a category to be showcased, or as an object of demand, but as an instrument for political fight. Bodies are exposed and are used to show slogans and banners, like: “My body, my rules”, “We are all sluts”, “If being free is to be a slut, then we are all sluts”, “Not a saint, and not a whore”, “Take your crucifix from my secular uterus”, “My body is not an invite”, “No is no”, Machismo kills”, etc. Based on all this, the objective of this thesis is to analyse how Campina Grande‟s Slutwalk problematizes the female body and what its political intentions are. The time period utilized is from 2012 to 2016, which is the first and last year of the Slutwalk in Campina Grande, respectively. The nine current members of the Bruta Flor Feminist Collective (Slutwalk organizer in Campina Grande) were interviewed. The interviews were semi-structured and were focused on the categories of: body, slut, feminism and prejudice. The large degree of politicisation and commitment to the feminist movement on the part of the Bruta Flor members became evident through the interviews. Through the research I came to some conclusions. First, it became evident that the Slutwalk is truly a feminist movement that fights for the right for women to have control over their own bodies, or in other words, female empowerment. In this movement, the body is an instrument of political fight, in which the members write on their bodies the violations of regulatory norms, affirming that a woman‟s place is wherever she wants it to be, that her body belongs only to her, and breaking the standards of beauty. This is because what we see in the Slutwalk are women with all sorts of body shapes and sizes, many of which do not fit into current beauty standards. In other words, fat women, women with cellulite, women without curves, women with curly hair, etc. In this way, the Slutwalk‟s actions are a result of the logic of confronting a model produced by society that is dressed in misogyny and female submission practices.