Contributions from the Global South to intersectionality: Allowing rural difference to make a difference

We make our argument based on our research with the Marcha das Margaridas, as said above. We consider the Marcha as one of the most impressive instances of women’s organizing and praxis of feminist solidarity in rural contexts in twenty-first-century Latin America. First, it is impressive due to its size and mobilizing capacity, bringing between twenty thousand to one hundred thousand women from all of the twenty-seven Brazilian provinces—and very remote areas—to the national capital, Brasília. Second, and, related to that, the Marcha’s diversity is noticeable, as women situated in various specific rural contexts (with varying land property relations, types of food production, histories of struggles and specific conflict lines, dynamics of racialization, relations to the natural resources) come together. Women situated in different urban contexts also join the mobilization. Third, although rural working women make up the majority of the grassroots base, due to the organizational and political leadership of the rural trade union movement, the Marcha emerged through a politics of alliances with women’s movements, feminist movements, urban trade unions, agrarian movements, and NGOs (Motta & Teixeira, 2022). Finally, the Marcha is an interesting case to investigate processes of solidarity-building, thanks to its durability. With its first edition taking place in the year 2000, they have managed to establish a timetable of periodic mass actions, with six editions so far (2000, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019). We draw on different types of data: documental analysis of archival material produced by the Marcha, participatory observation of the march in 2015 and 2019, and semi-structured interviews with activists.he Marcha politically build solidarity bridging place-based struggles and social differences, always informed by the category of rurality. Considering place-based struggles, we saw in their documents and in the organization of the street march, that a very important aspect is the recognition of the specific sites where rural working women live, work, and struggle. The Marcha makes efforts of taking the diversity of rural contexts and place-based struggles, related to specific geographies and biomes, into account. Most often the socio-spatial context is related to the natural environment, for example regarding access to land and to water. Different environments, regions, and biomes create specific working possibilities and restraints, entail specific types of resources for production, and thus concrete political demands. By naming these and displaying the diversity of rurality in their narrative and in their political agenda and street performance, the Marcha is able to bring together women from all over the country. Because of the adaptation to changing needs and struggles based on different places, the Marcha can be seen as a process of solidarity-building instead of a static alliance.

The Marcha politically build solidarity bridging place-based struggles and social differences, always informed by the category of rurality. Considering place-based struggles, we saw in their documents and in the organization of the street march, that a very important aspect is the recognition of the specific sites where rural working women live, work, and struggle. The Marcha makes efforts of taking the diversity of rural contexts and place-based struggles, related to specific geographies and biomes, into account. Most often the socio-spatial context is related to the natural environment, for example regarding access to land and to water. Different environments, regions, and biomes create specific working possibilities and restraints, entail specific types of resources for production, and thus concrete political demands. By naming these and displaying the diversity of rurality in their narrative and in their political agenda and street performance, the Marcha is able to bring together women from all over the country. Because of the adaptation to changing needs and struggles based on different places, the Marcha can be seen as a process of solidarity-building instead of a static alliance.

Regarding the second type of solidarity building, namely, the bridging of social differences, we have analysed how rurality is a key category of articulating a political subject. In line with Aguiar (2015), we have traced the always evolving political meanings of the collective “we” formed by the Marcha das Margaridas. The self-identification in the Marcha has changed over time to a more inclusive term. Starting with the political subject rural working women, an intersection of class, gender and rurality, the negotiations over the coalitional identity Margaridas (Motta, 2021) have resulted in the diversification of rurality and the political subject has progressively changed to include “women from the field, the forest, and the waters.” More than different places, the rural difference relates to a worker identity and specific human-environmental relations involved. A politics of location, which is not place-based but pivots on socio-material locations, takes into account the diversity of rural situations in which women work and live and informs a feminist politics of difference in the Marcha subject’s formation. This process allows diversity within the category of rurality, as it opens to more identities of working women in non-urban contexts. It means that if there are commonalities shaped by gender, class and rurality, which take women to join in a coalition, their political work of solidarity-building recognizes differences within rural working women, so that all different segments see themselves represented in the political subject. Since 2015 racial, ethnic and generational categories became more visible in the demands of the movement, but there is still a lot of (political) work to be done in articulating Indigeneity and an anti-racist agenda and political subject. The Marcha actively constructs their political subject and is still working on building solidarity. We see this as a precondition for the movement’s achievements and their successful ways of forging alliances.

In short, we have argued for the importance of looking closely at which categories of difference matter in the actual struggles of solidarity-building. We identified rurality as a category of difference that emerges within the struggles from the Marcha das Margaridas in Brazil. We claim that rurality is a category of colonial difference, one which decenters the whiteness and urban predicaments of European-modernist conceptions of solidarity. For the Latin American context, we believe that rurality can be fruitfully added to the salient categories of difference already identified by Black Feminists in the US, namely race, class and citizenship. We hoped to have shown how socio-spatial differences that are at play in the coloniality of power in Latin America and the Global South, add to the complexity of intersectionality. We believe that the urban-rural difference and the category of rurality could inform other struggles in areas of commodities extraction, too. And we wanted to encourage researchers to find other categories of difference emerging in other cases of solidarity-building. We therefore proposed open-ended, feminist theorizing of solidarity.