Fighting on the margins, being the margin itself: revisiting the border debate through the prism of women's political struggles in the Amazon

Abstract

This article revisits the classic debate within the social sciences and humanities on borders, taking these concepts and including others in order to situate analysis of borders from the perspective of women's political struggles in the Amazon, seeing the Amazon as an internal border par excellence. We note that border dynamics comprise a process with socio-spatial as well as ideological and symbolic repercussions, combining territorial enclosures with impositions of ways of thinking (“border mentalities”). In this way, the border is understood as an epistemological device which allows us to observe a human condition of liminality and extrapolate spatial specificity, imposing hierarchies and subordination of bordering female bodies which are subdued and violated through typically masculinized reasoning and actions in border areas. Violence at borders contains a political aspect which has a different dimension for the women who live there. Border areas are consequently characterized as places of political violence against “border-women” and, in turn, as places where political forms that approach the politics of the common or communality are dismissed and made powerless.