Narratives from Casa Tina Martins' Women's referral center: Aesthetics of existence in the struggle against gender violence

Abstract

AbstractThis study intends to evidence narratives of the political experience of the Casa Tina Martins Women's Referral Center, to understand how the women of the group constitute and organize themselves against gender violence. This was done from the articulation between the esthetics of existence proposed by Foucault (2014) and the work of feminist authors such as Margareth Rago (2013) and others, in which the problematization of experiences that allow the subject to rethink the world can be seen as a way of understanding social oppression without reducing the subject to the role of inert victim, but showing how they are always invested by power in their ways of existing and resisting. Initially, an immersion in the Center was carried out from the perspective of Feminist Participatory Action Research (Ponic et al., 2010). Then, reports were collected to build narratives of participants. The field research showed that the participation and engagement in a social movement stem from the individual process of struggle with the various forms of subjection and violence in the life trajectory of each woman. Moreover, the Center could be understood as a core of teachings to all types of organizations since it is a remarkable experience that overlaps its political goal with its feminist ways of organizing as a “meta‐organizational” phenomenon. Finally, it was possible to consider Casa Tina Martins as an enabling space to question gender‐based violence and promote personal narratives by feminist women as political possibilities of resistance and social change.