Overview

A feminist critique of Epistemologies of the South makes it possible to distinguish with greater clarity that the abyssal rationality inscribed in the modern logocentric thought is also androcentric and anthropocentric. In other words, abyssal separation is also reflected in sexism, understood as a system of disjunction and hierarchy based on the opposition between feminine and masculine, reduced to biosocial attributes created and fueled by itself.

Many feminists works have demonstrated how women's strategies are [co-opted] for the benefit of men (Whathouse; Vijfhuizen, 2001) or as warns Silvia Federici (2004) women were invented as 'housewives', responsible for the care and infrastructure of life and the conditions necessary for production and the consequent accumulation of capital. The transformation of labour into a commodity, which can be bought and sold, had, as a consequence, a paradigmatic change in the concept of labour and economy. If work was understood for a long time as another name for a human activity which goes with itself, which in its turns is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized (Polany, 1975 [1944]: 72) with the modern industrial revolution it becomes the activities that may have exchange value in the capitalist market. Thus, women's labour carried out outside the industrial e and commercial sphere, that is, in the domestic or community space, since they are not salaried -  have no exchange value in the market - they cease to be considered labour or, at most, are considered as reproductive work. As Amaia Orozco (2014) argues, the promotion of a reactionary care ethics is at the basis of the modern social contract that continues to maintain the obsession for the conquest of women's knowledge and bodies (Federici, 2004), reorganising and re-appropriating their ways of life , their activities, in short, their work.

In this seminar, I have two fundamental objectives. The first is to make a feminist critique of Epistemologies of the South; the second, based on this criticism, is to reflect on the dichotomy between productive and reproductive work.

Bio note

Teresa Cunha. Born in Huambo, Angola, Teresa Cunha holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Coimbra. She is a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra where she lectures in several PhD courses; co-coordinates the Humanities, Migrations and Peace Studies Research Group (NHUMEP), the Gender Workshop Series and Epistemologies of the South Workshops Series as well as the Epistemologies of the South Research Programme. She is an associate researcher at CODESRIA and the Centre for African Studies of Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique. In 2017, she was awarded the Order of Timor-Leste by the President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. Her research interests are feminisms and post-colonialisms; women post-war transition, peace and memories; other feminist economies and economies; human rights. She has published several books and scientific articles in several countries and languages, such as: Women InPower Women. Other Economies created and led by women from the non-imperial South; Never Trust Sindarela. Feminisms, Post-colonialism, Mozambique and Timor-Leste; Essays on Democracy. Justice, dignity and well-being; They in the South and in the North; Women's Voices of Timor; Timor-Leste: Courage Observation Chronicle; Feto Timor Nain Hitu - Seven Women of Timor »; Walk Through Other Roads and Roots of Participation.