Gender Relations in the context of the rural area of the municipality of Barreiros

Abstract

Our research is an integral part of the Agroecology Project, Organic Agriculture and Sustainable
Development in the South of Pernambuco. In this research we seek to understand how
Gender Relationships are produced and reproduced, and how these relationships materialize
in Educational Actions in the rural communities of Baetê and Cachoeira Alta, in the municipality
of Barreiros - PE. We used complementarily the techniques of Focus Group and Semi-structured
Questionnaires to bring us closer to our object of study. Gender inequalities do indeed produce
a kind of “symbolic violence” that materializes in people’s daily lives. Gender relations in
rural areas have been revealed as an important phenomenon in the cultural fabric that makes
up the day-to-day life of rural communities. The Agroecological conception presents an important
civilizing potential that can collaborate with the advancement, in the sense of making fairer
and equitable, of the relations of gender in the rural environment. Although most of the men
and women interviewed still demonstrate unequal and unjust gender relations, we also see
clues to a growth of the revolutionary consciousness of fair and egalitarian gender relations as
one of the expressions of a better and fairer world.