Mujeres, memoria e identidad política

• Published in: Historia antropología y fuentes orales 1999-01 (21), p.53-66
• Main Authors: Ferreira, Elizabeth F. Xavier, García, Xosé Lois
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Subjects: Búscate la vida
• ISSN: 1136-1700

This article discusses the role and the consequences of the construction of collective memory in the redefinition of social identities. It does so through a concise analysis of this type of experience in the lives of 13 Brazilian women who were political prisoners of the military dictatorship that ruled Brasil from 1964 to 1985. In their case, this redefinition of social identities unfolded into two different fields. The first relates to the sphere of political action itself, with their active participation in the political life of their country as they joined the urban guerrilla movement to confront the arbitrary regime. The other is also political, but in a more specific sense: it refers to the breaching of the code of the gender hierarchy of their own society. In the discussion that is brought forward in the text, there arises the question of the effects of these experiences in relation to a central issue in Brazilian society: that of the possibility of individuals to ascend to the status of full citizenship in a system whose democratic rights have not yet contemplated all within that same society and the need to resort to radical action in order to do so. To ratify this, the experience of women who are nowadays engaged in the movement for the land reform in Brazil is also evoked. It may help compose a new profile that seems to be emerging in the gender structure of our culture. The conclusion points out the fact that an important part of the process of transformations within this gender hierarchy has been predictably political, but of a very specific kind: that of radical political action. This certainly opens a new field of investigation.