Sementes crioulas: resistência e desafios na experiência do movimento de mulheres camponesas em Santa Catarina

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of landrace seeds within the Movement of Peasant Women (MMC), aiming to identify their potential for MMC/SC and to understand how they have been challenging and transforming patriarchal relations of gender, class, race, and generation from the perspective of agroecological peasant feminist struggles. The research is grounded in a qualitative approach built upon popular education practices developed with peasant women, thus characterizing it as militant research. The theoretical framework draws on authors who examine peasantry, gender and feminist geography, popular peasant feminism, and landrace seeds. The study focuses on the MMC in the western region of Santa Catarina. Methodologically, the investigation employed field diary records, conversations with women seed guardians, and the development of ten inventories of productive homegardens—one in each participating municipality—complemented by photographic documentation. The personal and social relevance of the study stems from its connection to my involvement in the Movement, whose mission is the liberation of women from all forms of violence, as well as from its contribution to strengthening agroecological agriculture and advancing scientific production on a topic still lacking systematic investigation. The results indicate that the actions of the MMC, particularly through its Seed Program, encouraged women to share their seeds, granting visibility to the guardians and recognition to their knowledge. This represents a formative and practical process that unveils limiting conceptions and enhances the set of conditions necessary for seed production. The study found that landrace seeds act as entry points for propositional actions, reaffirming that seeds and land are structural elements of food production and food sovereignty. The inventories reveal that seeds in productive homegardens constitute practices of resistance and, at the same time, forms of denunciation of the capitalist, patriarchal, and racist agricultural model, whose historical roots lie in colonialism and which, today, is expressed in agribusiness and in the commodification of nature under the control of large corporations. The experiences with landrace seeds in the homegardens of the women participating in the MMC indicate real possibilities for re-signifying ways of life and relationships with land, food, economy, environment, work, and existence itself. This set of practices strengthens the continuity of peasant family agriculture and contributes to building the identity of peasant women as autonomous subjects, bearers of knowledge, and promoters of relations of care and equity with the diverse forms of life.