Memories, feminisms and other conducts

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a discussion about the subjectivation process triggered by neoliberal rationality and formulate alternative actions able to counterbalance the competition and efficiency logic, arguing that ‘other conducts’ can be find in everyday practices of women that live in the self-constructed urban occupations motivated by the caring, sharing and non-mercantile exchanges pratices. Such proposition demands the researcher to assume a new posture that implies to be engaged and opened to non-academic forms of knowledge. With this another perspective, employing cartography as a research method, two courses was offered and developed in cooperation with Rosa Leão Occupation women, in Belo Horizonte. Building upon the understanding that self-built urban occupations are always seen from a perspective of precarity and lacking, portrayed as such by the media and the technical status-quo, the objective of such courses was to enhance and provide such vision with a further degree of complexity, giving visibility to other narratives that were created from references and memories of women that inhabit and experience the routine of such territory. Facing the challenge of constructing instruments that could trigger a process both dynamic and shared by the actors engaged in the project, and in addition, bring into evidence possible dialogues between feminist theories and everyday practices of the women from the occupation, we opted for the construction of devices that activated the affective memory of these women. Memories and experiences were narrated, registered and, finally, were turned into supports (posters, banners, book) of an installation for the celebration of the occupation’s anniversary. A fabric of memories and knowledge that manifested powerful and subversive subjectivities, announcing paths for the construction of other conducts.