Women In Power Women: Democracy and human dignity in non-capitalist experiences led by women in South-East Africa

Abstract

My feminist and critical scientific work aspires to go beyond the acknowledgment of the patriarchal knowledge compulsion to oppress and confine women to subaltern ontological existences. In my view, it is necessary to take into account as well, the colonial and the capitalist constitutive character of the present hegemonic social and epistemological order, to understand better the women‟s agency against oppression. The post-colonial feminist approach that I follow combines a deep critique of the persistent patriarchal, colonial and capitalist multi-tentacle power relations that feed and operate upon the invention of the other of the other, which have been, the victimized and quasi mummified women - from ever and forever - from the South. This paper results from my post-doctoral research project about how diverse women from Mozambique, South Africa and Brazil, living in diverse time-space and contexts, considered poor and oppressed, are narrating in their own terms, their knowledge and their emancipation, through non-capitalist modes of good living.