Existimos porque resistimos: história, lutas e conquistas do Grupo Afirmativo de Mulheres Independentes-Gami

Abstract

The Affirmative Group of Independent Women (GAMI), which is located in Redinha, a neighborhood of Natal city, RN, has arisen in 2003, when some lesbian and bissexual women detached themselves from the Habeas Corpus Potiguar Group (GHAP). The GHAP has been one of the first homossexual movements of the city, where there was also the activism of lesbian and bissexual women, who until then did not feel that their agenda had been represented by the group. Thus, they decided to form an autonomous movement. The women who created the GAMI started to act by considering the feminist claims, because at some moments the demands of the lesbian movement had a lot in common with feminism. Thereby, this paper aims to understand the historical shift of the GAMI, which has migrated from a homossexual movement to the field of feminist ideas. Accordingly, the group is here presented, in terms of its history and political formation, and its acts in the feminist movement and its activities and projects performed in the neighborhood are also analysed. As a ethnographic research, this work was conducted by my participation in different activities performed by the group: political formations, leisure activities and social projects. Through a qualitative approach, the adopted methodological procedures were participant observation, interviews, and bibliographical research. The achieved data indicate that the group is a space for affirmation of the identify of lesbian and bissexual women and also a mechanism for developing new agencies, in order to redefine new life practices. Furthermore, it was noticed how much the group is important to the current LGBTQ + movement, to the movement of women, and to the production of new feminisms, especially the peripheral feminism.