PRENDAS-SERPENTS: GAÚCHA WOMEN AND AMBIGUOUS PERFORMANCES IN THE PAMPA UNDER THE LOGIC OF THE PLANTATION

Abstract

This paper presents initial reflections from ongoing doctoral research conducted in the Brazilian Pampa, focusing on the presence of women in rural work amid the advance of soybean monoculture and plantation logic. The objective is to understand how these women creatively negotiate the norms of gender, race, and sexuality that permeate the construction of the “gaucho identity,” straining the boundaries between tradition and dissent. The methodological approach is anchored in the proposal of popular ethnography (Borges, 2009). At this moment, the research is in its initial stages, which is why I chose not to include the voices of the interlocutors in the text, prioritizing a theoretical-reflective character. The analysis is based on feminist border references (Anzaldúa, 1987) and the Plantationocene (Haraway et al., 2016; Davis et al., 2019; Chao et al., 2024), challenging classic anthropological formulations about the Pampa, such as those of Ondina Fachel Leal (2024), which associate gaucho identity exclusively with masculinity. The “prendas-serpents” are presented as a conceptual figure for thinking about women who inhabit ambiguity, transgression, and in-between places, rejecting fixed labels and performing gaucho identity in multiple ways. The research
points out, at this stage, that recognizing these presences requires shifting normative categories and making room for embodied epistemologies that reveal the vitality of the Pampa in transmutation.