José Miguel Nieto Olivar*
ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to understand feminine and indigenous forms of agency, especially that of the young women living in a specific Amazonian city, and the ways these forms emerge within and against the grammatical frame of insecurity, fear, death, and segregation that is produced by the Brazilian neocolonial project in the Amazon. I am interested in understanding the ways in which these women relate to a frame that places them in an ordinary state of exception between violent death and biological reproduction. I argue that the practices of sexual and economic exchanges between indigenous women and ‘white men’ are fertile for reflecting on these forms of agency in a frame of colonial contest. Finally, I suggest that these forms of agency indicate an analogy with counter-colonial mechanisms of cultural cannibalism.
KEYWORDS: Sexual economies, adolescents, borderlands, gender, sexual violence, state.
*Public Health Faculty, University of São Paulo; Sao Paulo Research Foundation, São Paulo, Brazil
**(2018): Violence, the state and gendered indigenous agency in the Brazilian Amazon, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, DOI: 10.1080/23802014.2018.1502049