As mulheres do Cariri e os caminhos da legitimidade política

Abstract

This study goal is to investigate the place held by women first ladies in the local power struggle inside the Cariri region in Ceara state. From political problematizations such as the network of meanings (BARREIRA, 1998), elections as representation rites (TURNER 2013), and gender as incomplete performance (BUTLER, 2010), I question: how do these women build political capital in order to legitimate themselves as city representatives? To answer it I did field work during 2016 election campaigns in five Cariri cities, during which I collected data with electoral state and federal agencies, observed conventions, meetings and rallies in these cities. I also did semi-structured interviews with the first ladies and ex-first ladies in order to engineer their trajectories for this local power build/maintenance. By this investigation’s end we inferred that, although the political field hinders the bodies comprehended as females entrance and permanence in its core, these women have found strategies to share the formal politics public space. In the specific context, women use the first lady title to acquire experience, build political capital and stage to show their administrative competence. Another strategy to steady themselves as public representatives is to trigger personal features, symbolically understood as female, which were away from the political field, as demand to renew contemporary politics.