Politics of the body, feminist politics. The new social movements in Brazil and the critique of identity

• In Event: Feminisms, social movements and the artistic and cultural transformations in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

Some of the contemporary feminist movements have been taking the nude female body as the substrate of the political actions, shifting the topographies expected for the female body and opening a debate in the interior of the feminist movements. The nude female body is posited as the matter and the action of feminist contemporary politics, shifting the nude body from known territories and re-territorializing it in the city, in the street, in the public space. The Slutwalk has been in Brazil, as in many countries, a political experience of placing the body in the street to denounce the many types of violence against women. This paper is a reading of the Slutwalk (Marcha das Vadias) in the city of Curitiba (Paraná), that in turn, lets go of the notion of identity and the fight for rights from the positing of a juridical-social identity to center on the idea of a political action executed with the nude body. To this reflection are brought the concepts from the work of Michel Foucault, such as biopolitics and the aesthetics of existence, as also is his idea of politics present in the last courses, given in the eighties. The concepts of political performance and of gender of Judith Butler are employed, as well as other post-structuralist feminist reflections. There will be, at the end, an exploration of the possibility of ‘making’ a politics that goes farther than the juridical identities, its center on the principle of a political action focused on the body.

Author

• Maria Rita A César, Universidade Federal do Paraná - UFPR