Rosa Choque - Girl Power

What it is gender? To answer this question, we need first to clarify that gender is not sex. Sex is biological: we are born women or men; it is something natural, that cannot be changed and that determines some things, as, for example, the capacity to generate a child and to breast feed.

However gender is social: it�s regarding the relations between men and women which had been constructed along history in some determined society and learned by socialisation � the process through which the codes, norms and basic rules of behaviour and relationship of some determined social group are taught.

Therefore, the gender relations can change continuously and differ in accordance with the place and time, but always reflecting the forms as each social group defines the status of women and men imposing differentiated roles that, in the majority of the societies, allow the subordination of the women. In other words they express the power relations defined by the fact of someone had been born man or woman.

According to this vision, nature defines that we are born male or female of the human being species, but the education we receive and the way through which we are treated by society are cultural phenomena that can be changed. The gender question is crucial to promote citizenship and must be present in the daily exercise of the popular education.

Source: Rede Mulher de Educa��o, Um outro jeito de ser (Another way of being), 1994, Rela��es de g�nero no ciclo de projetos (Gender Relations in the cycle of projects), 1996, "Gender and Citizenship" by Vera Vieira, page 89 from the publication �Educa��o Popular: Pr�tica Plural� (Popular Education: Plural Exercise), published by NOVA and Rede Mulher de Educa��o, 2000.

Expressions as these, repeated ad nauseam in the most diverse circumstances, promote a seductive association between the notions of Women and Nature. Along the history of the occidental thought, this body of ideas has changed into common sense that resurges today, in the contemporary discussion on the environmental crisis, identified as a civilization crisis. With an innovative status of theses, these old ideas in nothing inspire any change, they went back to the debate with new clothing: the feminine Nature or argumentation of Nature defining the women� social paper.

From the old logic of conquest/domination of nature, it seems to occur, at this time of ecological concern, notions on preservation/talking, balance maintenance, the perpetual. In this track, diverse current thoughts (the pros-) try to answer to the anxiety for historical perspectives with a set of �definitive�, �eternal� values, chronological substitutes of the agonizing progress ideologies. The intention is to, in front of the diagnosed �bankruptcy ' of the models served up to this day, appeal to the essence: thus the resurrection of the idea of �feminine nature', non-historical, positively closer to the core of all things, guaranteeing inherent authenticity to its proposals. And more, endowed with the glow of an apparent inversion of the hierarchy of values: worshiping what it was previously rejected.

If the context is, without a doubt, unknown, and the proposal appeals to deep yearnings, these concepts don�t bring in themselves, basically, nothing new: the naturalization of certain people categories has been part, for centuries, of the dominant occidental thought�s repertoire, as by the way, in most of the times, with the intention to oppress, explore or even to obliterate them.
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From the poster "O C�REBRO DAS BALEIAS - ou do 'feminino' e da 'natureza' no Pensamento Ocidental" (The Whale brain, or the 'feminine' and the 'nature' on the West thought), distribuited by SOS Corpo.

Nobody is born woman: It becomes woman. No biological, psychic, economic destiny defines the way that the human female assumes in the society�s bosom; it is the whole body of civilization that elaborates this intermediate product between male and the castrated that they characterize as feminine." (Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex", 1949)

"The woman is Nature", "The woman is closer to Nature", "The woman expresses, by her own body, a narrow link to the natural world, the natural cycles." "The feminine nature determines the woman�s destiny."