A Gira of women in march: a psychosociological approach to community practices in the struggle for life

Abstract

This work addresses the strategies and collective practices of women participating in the Marcha das Margaridas (March of the Daisies) and the Marcha das Mulheres Indígenas (March of Indigenous Women), held in Brasília-DF, understanding them as a psychosociological and ecologically social phenomenon of community practices. Aiming to identify the strength of the encounter between the marches and to understand them as psychosocial practices and strategies, we employed the analysis of documents produced within the mobilizations, associated with participant observation in organizational events and participation in conversation circles, bringing the documentary data for reverberation in the women’s fields of action. The study is grounded in intersectional feminist frameworks, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous philosophies, and Latin American community psychology, emphasizing the praxis of social movements, situated knowledge, and the collective construction of knowledge. Along this path, the central concept identified was the category gira, which encompasses the strategies and collective dimensions of women in movement. The gira represents spaces of circularity, healing, and confluence, where the conflicts experienced by women and their communities are shared, their forms of mobilization are strengthened, and new articulations are created to confront socio-environmental injustices. The study identifies six content units that underpin the gira: public policies and rights; power and participation; confluence; education and knowledge; body-territories; and representativity. These dimensions show how the marches produce their own political agendas, sustained by the diversity of subjects and the collective construction of knowledge, articulating local experiences with national agendas. We conclude that the gira, as an epistemological, ontological, and political category, expresses the power of a woman-subject knowledge in movement, which challenges linearity and calls for the circularity of time, body, and politics. The marches thus emerge not only as events of protest and denunciation, but also as pedagogical, poetic-political, and community spaces that create women’s own methodologies.