Corporeidade, agroecologia e mulheres: um processo de construção de saberes por meio da Escola Regional de Mulheres do MST

Abstract

This research sought to understand the influence of the training process of the Regional Women's School (ERM) of the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) on the construction of agroecological knowledge and on women's corporeality. It sought to reflect on a particular experience of a social movement, which presents agroecological knowledge established in a dialog between popular and scientific knowledge and has corporeality as a concrete expression of human existence, permeated by the experiences and processes of social and cultural relations. The research was carried out in the Central-Southern Mesoregion of the state of Paraná and the methodology was based on qualitative research with an ethnographic bias. Semi-structured interviews were carried out and the study was based on the life story narratives of three peasant women. Records were also kept using a field diary. The methodological path of the research is presented first, followed by a contextualization of the Cantuquiriguaçu Citizenship Territory and the MST in Brazil, in the state of Paraná and in the Central-Southern Mesoregion, in which the participation and organic nature of landless women is emphasized. The theoretical contributions of agroecology, corporeality, training processes in the MST and the record of the MST's ERM experience are discussed. Finally, we analyze the praxis carried out by women in the training process of the MST and the ERM in the construction of agroecological knowledge and corporeality. The research points to the relevance of the MST's ERM training process in the re-signification of women's corporeality and agroecological knowledge, and contributes to women's autonomy in the face of the MST's organizational processes. Furthermore, it can be said that agroecology is conceived from the perspective of a dialog of knowledge between popular knowledge and scientific technical knowledge, and it is through dialog that reality is constructed and transformed. Through formative praxis, agroecological processes are consolidated, based on food production, cooperation and the constitution of peasant identity, with a view to incorporating agroecology as a way of life, which can only be realized in the materiality of free territories that value nature and biodiversity, the freedom of bodies and the construction of egalitarian gender relations, without violence.