Sobre silhuetas negras: experiências e agências de mulheres escravizadas (Cachoeira do Sul, c. 1850 - 1888)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore and comprehend enslaved women experiences, choosing as its locus Cachoeira do Sul in Rio Grande do Sul, during the 19th century. In order to search for the experiences, agencies and resistances of women that lived slavery, we have focused on three spheres of their lives: work, motherhood and sexual-affective relationships. Therefore, micro-history has been used as a methodology, intersectionality as the theoretical support and E. P. Thompson’s concept of experience. Our main sources were the criminal cases, integrated with other documents such as parish records, manumissions, guardianship processes and inventories, that became possible to find due to data crossing. In the first chapter, when approaching the work experience in enslaved women’s lives, we brought: the perception of a female and multi-ethnic Cachoeira do Sul; data and discussions around manumission in an intersectional approach; the importance of thinking slavery and freedom not in stiff lines, but in their interaction; the forms of autonomy that could be conquered in slavery and which implications certain occupations had on the captive experience of those women. In the second chapter, which covers black motherhood, we could follow the struggle waged by some women in the protection of their children and in the attempts of protecting the autonomies they had conquered for themselves and their peers. We have also problematized how those women lived their enslaved lives and as protectors of their children. In the last chapter we seek to understand how the sexual-affective relationships were experienced between subjects who had the same juridical and race condition, but not gender: what kind of relationships were they searching, what were the female expectations and how could they dialogue with the race and gender stereotypes of the period, and how did black manhood were experienced between enslaved men.