60

This paper analyzes the lives of rural activists in the Nordeste of Brazil, in order to examine the ways in which empowerment is constructed. Getting involved in the Nordeste Rural Women Workers’ Movement (MMTR) allows women to become politicised and break with their own invisibility and stigmatisation. This process of individual empowerment is articulated around the construction of a ‘we’: ‘We are diverse rural workers.’ Laying claim to one’s belonging to a group also sends a message to women outside of the movement, and allows activists to carry out a transmission of their knowledge. In terms of their practices, gender roles are renegotiated, in different ways for each person, but always tending towards an ‘acting for oneself’, and pushing certain individuals to laying claim to academic and political spaces.