Embroidering resistance: Daily struggles of women affected by the Baixo Iguaçu Hydropower Dam in Paraná, South Brazil

Based on a research journey in collaboration with a Brazilian social movement,
the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), this Research Paper
explores the experiences of resistance of women whose lives were flooded by
the Baixo Iguaçu Hydropower Dam in Paraná, South Brazil. Dominant
development narratives promote hydropower dams as a sustainable source of
energy in Brazil, while silencing the voices of those inhabiting the affected
lands, and underestimating the social and ecological destruction that large dam
projects provoke. Drawing from feminist political ecology, decolonial theory
and Latin American political ecology, this research examines how women in
Baixo Iguaçu who were affected by the construction of a dam on their rural
lands embroider their embodied, emotional and daily resistance. Guided by
‘arpilleras’ – embroideries that women organized in the MAB create to narrate
their silenced stories – and drawing from conversations and in-depth
interviews, this research brings their voices to the centre. Collectively, women
in the MAB apply the language of arpilleras to a popular education feminist
methodology, transforming sewing into politics. In Baixo Iguaçu, women
affected by the dam struggle daily against displacement, the flooding of their
territories, the destruction of their communities and care networks, the violent
stigmatization of their political engagement, and their exclusion from spaces of
negotiation and decision-making, among others. I suggest that arpilleras are an
alternative language through which women express their knowledges, emotions
and experiences otherwise. Arpilleras grow into a political strategy that uses art:
a strategy for widening women’s political participation, for creating collective
identity, and for building counter-hegemonic narratives. These narratives rise
up to challenge the dominant energy development model that transforms
women’s rivers and bodies into commodities