Banca de DEFESA: ESTER PAIXAO CORREA

WOMEN ON THE ROAD: ETHNOGRAPHIC MEETINGS ON THE ROUTES OF SOUTH AMERICA

 Women. Travelers. Agency. Displacements. South America.

The different ways women hit the road in South America are marked by how they organize, execute, and perceive a backpacking trip in the region. There are several possible contours in these cultural productions, which narrate other perspectives of an historically masculinized and risk- and danger-associated practice. I intend to establish through this multi-sited ethnography a dialogue between feminist anthropology, feminist geography, and backpacking trips, with the aim of analyzing the experiences of women who backpack along the routes of South America. Motivated by turning a social experience into a research topic, and encouraged by particular personal experience as a traveler, I conducted multisite ethnographic field research between 2019 and 2022. I called this endeavor “ethnographic backpacking”. This consisted of experiencing transit to meet other travelers on the road. The itinerary was built between different countries: Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. The ethnographic encounters occurred along the research route, both in physical and digital spaces. The use of encounters as a methodological strategy made it possible to establish 10 interlocutions with Latin American women travelers of different nationalities, social profiles, and travel styles. Through the shared experience it was possible to reconstruct the routes, paths and tracks; the contextualization of places, spaces, events, and trajectories; the contrasting of experiences and also the explicitness of categories and ways of being, moving and staying, common to the different groups. In this way, the research findings show that the categories of travelers are built through the forms of work developed during the trip and the choice of the means of transportation and lodging used. The encounters on the road and the landings are built as an equally important part of the experience. It was also possible to realize that these trips are multifaceted cultural experiences that challenge established cultural constructions, such as the idea of danger, and expand self-formation processes. Moreover, they are sustained through labour practices, strategies of physical and subjective displacement, and also by the crossing of borders.