Feminismos, redes sociais e modos de vida: a experiência militante de jovens professoras

Abstract

This research is interested in the militant experience of young female teachers that act on multiple agendas and multiple focuses and who make intensive use of social networks as a locus of resistance, in accordance with the ways of action in contemporary struggles. Thus, the subjects in this research are Sara, Zuca and Monique, three young teachers who claim to be militants. They engage in agendas that involve the school, public education, the teaching profession, but, above all, feminisms, the LGBT demands, among other causes that have disputed the scene of recent movements and mobilizations. As a theoretical-methodological strategy, a netnography was made on the social network Facebook of these three teachers, followed by an interview. The research proposes an ethical-political study, founded on Michel Foucault’s concepts of experience and ethics. Foucault’s theoretical construction allows us to draw connections between ethics, politics and truth-telling, which will trigger a close relationship between politics, ethics and experience. Based on what the teachers shared and published on Facebook and on what they said during the interview, it was possible to find elements that relate to the pleasure of living a militant life. This statement on pleasure seems to say: “fight and defend causes and agendas concerning ourselves and others”, since it involves a set of discourses of struggle and defense of the causes and agendas of the workers, the working classes, the popular classes, the most poor people, but also of diversity, minorities and different ways of living life. In addition, the research has revealed that the teachers seek to recognize the moral obligation to fight and defend by responding to a type of network feminism, built from experiences, everyday situations and alliances between feminisms and other struggles. Among the practices of this network feminism, there is the solidarity action regarding causes and agendas for which they like, publish, share and for which they take to the streets. There are also the practices of militant living, an ethical work about themselves, for which the teachers show themselves in search of consistency between what they say and the ways in which they live their lives. From these practices, they seem to have the purpose of acting together with those who are in search of new democratic and collective forms of government; and who are also struggling so that lives in conditions of precariousness and vulnerability are possible to be lived, to be just and viable lives. This thesis seeks to defend that the militancy experience of the researched teachers is constituted by network feminism practices. These are practices that bet on the transformative power of “small” constraints and tensions produced on social networks, which is revealing other ways of life and attempts of eroding truths that are difficult to destabilize.