Embroidering Resistance: Emotional, embodied, everyday struggles of women affected by dams in Brazil

Abstract

The article analyzes the daily emotional struggles embodied by peasant women affected by a hydropower dam in South Brazil and the use of arpilleras – a popular arts textile technique – as a means of resistance. The article is based on ethnographic research done in collaboration with the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) in a region affected by the Baixo Iguaçu dam, which is the sixth and last dam constructed on the Iguaçu River. I use a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) approach in order to analyze women’s resistance, highlighting the emotional, embodied, and everyday dimensions of their struggles. Listening to women and paying attention to their narratives embroidered in arpilleras reveals that the implementation of a dam project brings about material impacts as well as complex gendered, emotional, and embodied effects. The article demonstrates that resistance to dams not only takes place in protests and direct action, but also in the everyday, embodied and emotional struggles, women’s networks, and through art. By embroidering arpilleras, women affected by dams in Brazil organized in the MAB are developing a political strategy that uses art as a powerful and gendered tool in their resistance to dams, with transformative effects.