Event Title
The feminine issues: Narrative and testimony
Start Date
25-6-2010 1:00 PM
End Date
25-6-2010 2:30 PM
Description
This presentation is part of the Testimony and Listening track.
There is a book called O avesso da memória: cotidiano e trabalho da mulher em Minas Gerais no século XVIII. (The memory opposite: woman's daily life and work in the eighteenth century Minas Gerais). The history that it tells is the one of the invisible women who worked in that area of gold mining, where the poor prevails over the wealthy. It is an unofficial history that seems to be not important. The author proves, with a very clever analysis of documents and other evidences, that in a time of strong poverty, for the gold represented wealth only for a few, the (poor) women played a very significant role in the economical situation with their struggle for life. They worked in the commerce of goods (food mostly) and in some other not so acceptable field such as prostitution (in a area where there were not much women). But it is as though their history did not occur. It is as though it did not matter.
Some questions lies behind these circumstances: Is that a situation that is in the past? Are the reality or the participation of women being told in a more precise way now-a-days? Is there an open channel through which the experience of poor and invisible women can be told? Are they able to express an identity that allows them to participate of the banquet of life?
Bauman talks about identity, a word that becomes void with the excessive use as rhetoric assertion. He refers to those who can not afford to have an identity because they have no space to express what they essentially are:
“On one hand of the emerging global hierarchy are the ones that constitute and dislocate their identities more or less to their own wish, choosing them in the range of awfully wide offers of planetarium inclusion. In the other hand, there is the overcrowd space of the ones to whom the access to the identity choice is denied. They do not have the right to manifest her preferences and that, in the end, are oppressed by applied identities and imposed by other – identities that they themselves resent, but do not have permission of abandoning neither of which get if liberate. Identities that stereotype, humiliate, stigmatize, turn humans into non-humans....
The feminine universe is not an exclusive field of middle class and educated women. There are those whose independence corresponds to an extension of their need to survive. Their work conditions, their position on what concerns the marital relationship, the way they deal with the social roles are almost exclusively related with the impositions of having to earn money enough not to starve and not to the live in the streets.
An example would be the domestic workers in Brazil. This is traditionally a feminine category. The statistics show that, in 2006, there were 94,3% women against 5,7% men as domestic employees. It is well known that the legal system treats them differently from every other employee and to establish the truthfulness of this affirmative it would be enough to say just one thing: there is no limitation of daily work hours. That is why some of them must be up early in the morning to serve breakfast and work till late in the evening after the clean the dinner kitchen.
Those women, who work as maids, are in charge of the tasks who once belonged to the housewife. They organize and clean their house. They take care of their children. And in a country full of economical problems and inequalities as Brazil they also have the house of their own to take care of. And they have children of their own that are left behind with no schooling facility that could give them shelter for the whole day.
But the paradox of this situation is exactly in the sphere of the identity. The women to whom they work tend not to see them as equal. They tend to find justice in the fact that they do not have the same labor rights.
This can be understood as a local example. But it shows something about the way things are. Those women have no way to elaborate the testimony of their experience of being women. They are not allowed to choose an identity and to live it fully. They are hidden as if they did not count. They are lonely but they are not the only ones.
If their experience and their testimony is not heard, it will be easy to conclude that there is not much difference between them and the women whose history was told in the book previously referred (O avesso da memória: cotidiano e trabalho da mulher em Minas Gerais no século XVIII. (The memory opposite: woman's daily life and work in the eighteenth century Minas Gerais)).
Their life does not compose the memory of the human beings. There is a risk that they are let out to be forgotten as the memory opposite.
If the feminine issues have any relevance their testimony can not be abandoned, because it is essential to the understanding of a reality fully lived that integrates the history of women.
The feminine issues: Narrative and testimony
This presentation is part of the Testimony and Listening track.
There is a book called O avesso da memória: cotidiano e trabalho da mulher em Minas Gerais no século XVIII. (The memory opposite: woman's daily life and work in the eighteenth century Minas Gerais). The history that it tells is the one of the invisible women who worked in that area of gold mining, where the poor prevails over the wealthy. It is an unofficial history that seems to be not important. The author proves, with a very clever analysis of documents and other evidences, that in a time of strong poverty, for the gold represented wealth only for a few, the (poor) women played a very significant role in the economical situation with their struggle for life. They worked in the commerce of goods (food mostly) and in some other not so acceptable field such as prostitution (in a area where there were not much women). But it is as though their history did not occur. It is as though it did not matter.
Some questions lies behind these circumstances: Is that a situation that is in the past? Are the reality or the participation of women being told in a more precise way now-a-days? Is there an open channel through which the experience of poor and invisible women can be told? Are they able to express an identity that allows them to participate of the banquet of life?
Bauman talks about identity, a word that becomes void with the excessive use as rhetoric assertion. He refers to those who can not afford to have an identity because they have no space to express what they essentially are:
“On one hand of the emerging global hierarchy are the ones that constitute and dislocate their identities more or less to their own wish, choosing them in the range of awfully wide offers of planetarium inclusion. In the other hand, there is the overcrowd space of the ones to whom the access to the identity choice is denied. They do not have the right to manifest her preferences and that, in the end, are oppressed by applied identities and imposed by other – identities that they themselves resent, but do not have permission of abandoning neither of which get if liberate. Identities that stereotype, humiliate, stigmatize, turn humans into non-humans....
The feminine universe is not an exclusive field of middle class and educated women. There are those whose independence corresponds to an extension of their need to survive. Their work conditions, their position on what concerns the marital relationship, the way they deal with the social roles are almost exclusively related with the impositions of having to earn money enough not to starve and not to the live in the streets.
An example would be the domestic workers in Brazil. This is traditionally a feminine category. The statistics show that, in 2006, there were 94,3% women against 5,7% men as domestic employees. It is well known that the legal system treats them differently from every other employee and to establish the truthfulness of this affirmative it would be enough to say just one thing: there is no limitation of daily work hours. That is why some of them must be up early in the morning to serve breakfast and work till late in the evening after the clean the dinner kitchen.
Those women, who work as maids, are in charge of the tasks who once belonged to the housewife. They organize and clean their house. They take care of their children. And in a country full of economical problems and inequalities as Brazil they also have the house of their own to take care of. And they have children of their own that are left behind with no schooling facility that could give them shelter for the whole day.
But the paradox of this situation is exactly in the sphere of the identity. The women to whom they work tend not to see them as equal. They tend to find justice in the fact that they do not have the same labor rights.
This can be understood as a local example. But it shows something about the way things are. Those women have no way to elaborate the testimony of their experience of being women. They are not allowed to choose an identity and to live it fully. They are hidden as if they did not count. They are lonely but they are not the only ones.
If their experience and their testimony is not heard, it will be easy to conclude that there is not much difference between them and the women whose history was told in the book previously referred (O avesso da memória: cotidiano e trabalho da mulher em Minas Gerais no século XVIII. (The memory opposite: woman's daily life and work in the eighteenth century Minas Gerais)).
Their life does not compose the memory of the human beings. There is a risk that they are let out to be forgotten as the memory opposite.
If the feminine issues have any relevance their testimony can not be abandoned, because it is essential to the understanding of a reality fully lived that integrates the history of women.