Peripheries as Places of (Re)Existence for Women: From the Body to the City

Abstract

The article examines how women living in impoverished peripheries with limited access to public support services for care work develop their daily (re)existences in response to the processes of dispossession imposed on their bodies by socioeconomic vulnerability and housing public policies. The research emphasizes the intersection of gender, race, and class in access to the right to the city and the construction of urban space, highlighting the ways in which these women act to mitigate the effects of precarious work, the deprivation of basic rights, the overload of care work, and housing in socio-spatially segregated areas. The article explores the paradoxical role of public housing policies, which function both as a means of access to housing and as a mechanism of control over women's bodies in these territories, restricting their autonomy and mobility within the city. The study adopts an ethnographic approach, employing participant observation, neighborhood walks, women's discussion circles, and field journals as methodological procedures to better understand the everyday forms of (re)existence and city-making practiced by the residents of the Viver Bem Residential Complex, located in the southern periphery of Santa Cruz do Sul/RS. The analysis explores how these women build mutual aid networks as a survival strategy, challenging the state's disciplinary logic. The discussion is framed through feminist and decolonial perspectives on cities and urban space, offering a critique of the universalist notion of the right to the city and advocating for the recognition of plural ways of inhabiting urban territories. The article reflects on how cities should be conceptualized based on the materiality of bodies in the territories they inhabit, incorporating knowledge derived from their concrete experiences and overcoming normative approaches that perpetuate inequalities.