Mulher rendeira: re-tecendo afetos e identidades de gênero nos sertões contemporâneos

Abstract

The colonization of the backlands of Brazil was conducted by cattle. Cattle and cowboys left tracks and set very strict limits on gender identities, marked by patriarchy. In the 2000s, new economic, political and cultural scenarios seem to allow the emergence of otherpossible configurations for the traditional definitions of backcountry men and women. This article deals with the changes provoked by the peripheral globalization that impacted the sexual division of the work, the ways of life and the gender representations in the semiarid zone of Bahia. He makes a feminist cut about the female representations expressed from the social and sexual innovations in the backlands. To understand this scenario, the study mixes contributions from New History, Symbolic Sociology and Ecofeminism, with the macro-narrative of Political Economy. The initiative makes a historical-bibliographic review integrated with analysis of media products. In short, this study is dedicated to understanding who these hybrid men and women are, entrenched between tradition and postmodernity, between the past and new information technologies, between the sertão and the globalized world, between the “Male goat” and “oxen neons”. The answers presented are clues to understand this new generation of backcountry and backcountry, which in an accelerated process of mutations, are reweaving their ways of life.