Marielle Franco was born in July 1979 in the Maré favela complex, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A mother, with Masters in Public Administration, self-identified as bisexual, the 5th most voted council woman in Rio de Janeiro, Marielle Franco raised the Human Rights issue against the militarisation of the favelas in the city. On the 14th March 2018 she was assassinated, along with her driver, Anderson Gomes. Some questions remain unanswered: Who killed Marielle and Anderson? How can we seek Justice for their deaths? However, Brazilian population have been responding to the genocide of Black people with strategies that can be seen in the last elections with more presence of Black women elected. This lecture will cover the HERstory of Marielle Franco to portray how intersectional oppressions are present in the Brazilian setting, as well the voices of resistance that have been flourishing. Topics on police brutality, the increase of Black women in the politics and Queer performativity will be the focus of this discussion.

Katucha Bento studied her BA in Sociology and Politics at the Foundation School of Sociology and Politics of Sao Paulo (FESPSP, Brazil) with a partial grant from a project called Políticas da Cor (Politics of Colour) funded by Ford Foundation. Before her MA she was involved in Educational projects, activism and teaching. Her MA programme was in Sociological Research at the University of Barcelona (UB, Catalonia). During this time, she worked as a researcher in two projects: one about migration flow in six different countries in Europe, the other with Transgender Women in Spain analysing the public Heath Care during their transition. Her MA research was on the construction of white lesbian desire challenging paradigms of whiteness and the possibilities of activism in the LGBTQI community. She is currently finishing her PhD on how the (post)colonial British setting affects Black Brazilian Women diasporic experiences. She is a visiting researcher at Leeds Beckett University, in the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality (CRED) and associated in QDFCT at the Justus-Liebig-Universitat in Giessen.

The Research Network in Queer Studies, Decolonial Feminisms and Cultural Transformations (QDFCT) is happy to document the conversation event „20th Century Left Feminisms: A Decolonial Reading“ from the 7th of November, at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC).

 

With the support of Frauen- und Gleichstellungsbeauftragte of JLU, Carole Boyce Davies (Cornell University) and Rhoda Reddock (The University of West Indies) joint us at the event. Carole Boyce Davies is a professor of English and Africana Studies. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008). Rhoda Reddock is Professor of Gender and Development and Head of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies. Her academic career included positions at Cipriani Labour College and at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague as well as the Institute for Social and Economic Research and the Department of Sociology, UWI St. Augustine campus. She was actively involved in the process leading up to the institutionalisation of gender studies at UWI and assumed her current position in 1994. Her publications include seven books, three monographs, four special journal issues and over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.