Introduction

Our chapter intersects with and disrupts feminist scholarship in relation to understanding of and contributions to the praxis of (feminist) protest camps. We do this as revolutionary feminist popular-educators, working with movements in the South (as geography and onto-epistemic positioning to Power) and in the region of Ceará and city of Fortaleza, Brazil. We develop a decolonising feminist intersectional revolutionary conceptual lens, which exists in dialectical and dialogical relation with the women’s cooperative Mãos que Criam of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra (MST) settlement, along with three Afro-Brazilian women’s poetry collectives of the periphery of Fortaleza (Elaspoemas, BaRRosas and Pretarau), and our own kinship-making praxis as authors who have been collaborating for the last 14 years.

In this chapter, we explore feminist/feminised protest camps as embodiments of Black, campesino (peasant farmer) and Indigenous sovereignties and reoccupations of tierra as both body and land. We stretch our conceptualisation of protest to the feminisation of resistance, our conceptualisation of camp to tierras or territory as land and body, and our conceptualisation of occupation to onto-epistemological reoccupations of raced and feminised southern subjects-in-relation, co-weaving new languages and literacies of the political-epistemological. We explore what this looks like and means for both a feminist politics of protest camps and a feminist theorisation of forms of decolonising feminist revolutionary praxis, and how it calls for the decolonising of reason and epistemological enfleshment (Motta, 2016, 2022, forthcoming). Our work connects the territories of the rural and the urban to make visible plural spatio-temporalities of both the temporary protest reoccupation of the urban periphery and/as Black feminised bodies, and the more long-standing occupations by rural campesino and Indigenous communities who are co-weaving social economies that centre pluridiverse forms of agricultural production and relationship with tierra as body. Within these more long-standing occupations are struggles of feminised resistances that seek to bring visibility and voice to the female revolutionary campesino, her experiences of exclusion and the wisdom that she brings to this revolutionary struggle.