Female Protagonism in the fight in defense of the traditional fishing territory of Enxu Queimado/RN
Women's Protagonism. Traditional Fishing Community. Women's Movement. Territorial Conflict.
The present dissertation, entitled “Female Protagonism in the fight in defense of the traditional fishing territory of Enxu Queimado/RN”, is the result of field research carried out in the traditional community of Enxu Queimado, located on the north coast 142km from Natal-RN. This community is experiencing a territorial conflict in which a real estate entrepreneur claims to have 184,000 hectares of the community's territory, which represents the entire area where the houses, swiddens, leisure tents, corrals and land are located released from the community (LITTLE, 2005). Faced with the territorial conflict, a group of women, mostly fishermen, came together to create the Resistance Committee in defense of the community's territory. Given this scenario, I sought to know, in this research, the history in the memory of the community, the ancestral roots of the women's movement of Enxu Queimado, the genealogical relationships between the first residents and the women who make up the Committee, the history of political articulation of these women and the paths that brought them to the Resistance Committee. Therefore, we carried out ethnographic research with participant observation, semi-structured interviews, bibliographic and documentary research, as well as using photographs to build visual narratives during field research. With an emphasis on feminist epistemology, we seek to analyze the female role in traditional fishing communities, questioning the silencing and invisibility that, historically, fishing women face (ALENCAR, 1991). We could see that the women's movement in Enxu Queimado has historical roots related to the role of women not only as a protagonist of care, but also of fishing, survival and the social organization of the community since its origins, as well as in the history of participation in social movements linked to popular education that boosted the political articulation of leading women.