PORTRAITS OF GENDER RESISTANCES AND RUPTIONS OF BODY-SPACE NORMS IN MARIA ANTÔNIA SOARES’ CORPOGRAPHY

Abstract

This research investigates how the trajectory of the working-class anarchist activist Maria Antônia Soares (1898–1991) enables an understanding of the relationships between body, gender, memory, and urban space in the early twentieth century. The objective is to analyze how the embodied and gendered experiences of working women participated in the production of the city, challenging boundaries between public and private spaces and revealing forms of political presence often erased by historiographical narratives. The research adopts an ethnographic approach to the archive, bringing together historical documents, working-class press sources, union records, photographs, and memorial materials, as well as the elaboration of a visual field notebook as an analytical tool for examining the relationships between body and space. Based on this documentary corpus, the study seeks to reconstruct Maria Antônia Soares’s urban trajectories and understand how her movements, militant practices, and forms of occupying the city produced other possibilities of public existence for women during the period. Preliminary findings indicate that her trajectory reveals how the embodied experiences and everyday practices of working women participated in the construction of spaces of resistance and political action. The research thus contributes to expanding the understanding of the city as a space produced through embodied experiences, struggles over memory, and gender relations.