Body-territory, social reproduction and cosmopolitic: reflexions from the struggles of indigenous women in Brazil

Abstract

The performance of indigenous women as leaders of their peoples is growing in Brazil. In view of the dismantling of the environmental and indigenous policy, by the current government, and the extractive threat on indigenous territories, the right to territory is the main banner of struggle for these women, and the central motivation for their growing presence in spaces built by the indigenous movement. The notion of Body-territory is increasingly vocalized and gains new meanings among indigenous women in Brazil, who use it as a symbol for the inseparable relationship between people and territory. The present work seeks to affirm this as a cosmopolitical category, which illuminates capitalist contradictions, and is employed as resistance to the exception-dispossession process that produces naked life as a dehumanization necessary for the advance of accumulation.