O empoderamento feminino no campo rural sob o olhar da abordagem da intra-ação

Abstract

This dissertation aims to understand how processes of empowerment among peasant women are (co)constituted through intra-actions between human and non-human elements. The study is grounded in a critique of individualistic approaches to empowerment and proposes a relational perspective that conceptualizes empowerment as a phenomenon emerging from intraactions among bodies, discourses, practices, and materialities. The dissertation is composed of three articles aligned with its specific objectives. The first article seeks to understand gender inequalities in the lives of peasant women within the context of Sustainable Rural Development through a metasynthesis of qualitative studies. The results highlight two central dimensions: institutional forces and women’s agentic engagement. As a social contribution, the study emphasizes the importance of policies and programs that are sensitive to local realities and that promote not only women’s inclusion but also their social repositioning, thereby avoiding processes of exploitation and the reproduction of inequalities. The second article explains how Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action can contribute to the analysis of social relations and women’s empowerment in rural contexts. To this end, a theoretical essay is developed, whose main contribution lies in presenting empowerment as a relational process constituted through multiple elements, offering an alternative approach to women’s empowerment compared to previous studies. This perspective demonstrates that empowerment does not emerge from previously constituted subjects, but rather from relations between human and non-human elements. In this sense, women are not the sole center of the process, but part of a network of elements whose intra-actions enable (or constrain) their social repositioning. Finally, the third article aims to understand how empowerment processes among women in a family farming social collective are sociomaterially (co)constituted. We adopt Van Manen’s methodological approach to support the analysis of a group of women family farmers who produce coffee in a rural municipality in the interior of Paraná. The results show that women’s empowerment emerges in a relational and ambiguous manner, through intra-actions among productive labor, family care, affects, materialities, and sociotechnical conditions that shape the group’s everyday life. The analysis reveals that participation in the coffee-producing collective expands spaces of recognition, belonging, and autonomy, while simultaneously intensifying workloads and responsibilities, giving rise to processes that oscillate between strengthening and exhaustion. Theoretically, the study contributes by shifting the understanding of women’s empowerment in rural contexts from individualistic approaches toward a relational and sociomaterial perspective that articulates the notion of intra-action with antenarratives. Based on this articulation, we coin the term empodera(breci)ment to capture the specific context of the group investigated in this dissertation.