Presented at the panel on Capitalist Crisis and New Paradigms, Working Group on Education, UFRGS-Reitoria, 14:00 – 16:00, January 25, 2012

First of all, let me congratulate the Working Group on Education and, in particular, Jorge Osorio for this incredible feat of providing a clear and rounded synthesis to a wide range of diverse ideas and proposals in the virtual seminar. His synthesis has been shared far and wide, thanks to the power of the internet. It is now a tool out there that can be used to generate further discussions and debates for catalyzing new thinking and teaching practices. I was asked to comment on his synthesis of part 1 – global context – and to link this with RIO+20 as an opportunity to deepen new paradigms. I will begin my comment by highlighting what Jorge had written about the role of education in this moment of global crisis, which is found toward the end of his synthesis paper. According to him:

“… education is understood as a process of capacity building of individuals and their communities, which enables them to organize, express themselves, speak, associate, act in networks, understand the coordinates of the current crisis and participate in the generation of a ‘global and local public opinion’ that is critical and deliberative. Education should consider as a crucial issue, the contents of a paradigmatic transformation of social thought, political and economic, to imagine and create the cultural conditions of a new way to ‘set’ the future.”

It is clear from the above that education is first and foremost about people and people’s capacities. While this may seem to be rather straightforward, in actual practice, I wonder how much of our ideas and the way we had taught were in fact driven by our concern for people – the women, men, children, old people, gays, lesbians, transgenders and transsexuals, indigenous peoples, workers, rural poor, homeless, black people, and many other social groups. I even wonder that of myself. As a teacher, how much weight have I given to the learner, as against perhaps what the educational institutions or the educational ministry or the educational experts or the government in power or the owners of private educational institutions or even the religious congregations that continue to run large universities have to say?

We are also reminded by Jorge that in the context of this fierce world:

“The theme of ‘subjectivity’ is a key aspect in the current public education. It is liberating to restore a sense of empowerment processes, understood as the development of civic and methodological resources for politics, generate knowledge, enhance knowledge and learning that occur in the democratic struggle… and the ongoing need of ‘radical-pragmatic weight’ (unpublished – possible, as Paulo Freire would say) in the definition of agreements, consensus and association with the diversity of political actors without sacrificing undisputed tests such as human rights, non-discrimination for any reason whatsoever, sexism, social ‘disposability’ due to cultural, health or religious stigmas.”

This point brings me to a small placard that I saw yesterday at the opening march of this thematic forum. After the downpour, I saw the placard lying on the ground beside a small group of young women and men who were trying to fix their very wet black colored clothes. I stopped and took a picture of the placard. The sign said “Sem autonomía das mulheres, nao ha democracia. Legalizacao do aborto JA!”

I believe this message powerfully brought home the point of what we mean by education as a process of capacity building and empowerment. Without women’s personal autonomy, which includes her right to control her body and sexuality, there could never be real democracy. As far as I can recall, women’s reproductive rights, including abortion, had been enshrined as one of the “undisputed tests of human rights” that the contributors to the virtual seminar said should not be “sacrificed”, as found in Jorge’s synthesis.

Sadly, however, I do not find enough elaboration of this concept of women’s autonomy and women’s rights in our political discourse. Instead, when it comes to signifiers of women that is repeatedly invoked, we speak of women as “nurturers,” “carers,” “workers,” and “leaders.” This is not to say that the concepts are unimportant. On the contrary, they are very important and my organization, DAWN, has raised these as well in various forums, the WSF included. So we should celebrate that these notions are now within the ambit of our progressive discourse towards alternatives. Yet, once again, we are silent about another set of rights that are of equal importance. Here, I am referring to women’s (and men’s) sexual and reproductive rights. As feminists and progessives, we have the responsibility to raise these in our debates. Or else, we will be reproducing female subjects all over again as incomplete and subordinated subjects, preferring to highlight their function as nurturers, welcoming them to share power and decision-making, but nevertheless continuing to bound their bodies and sexualities to the patriarchal control by men, state and religion.

Let me raise an inconvenient truth, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore, who by the way I have disagreements with in regards to his policy proposals. Nevertheless, the title of his documentary is quite appropriate, I believe, for what I have to say. The term “Inconvenient Truth” also makes us recall that climate change issues are going to be central to our debates on sustainable development at Rio+20.

What is my inconvenient truth?

I want to say that Brazil’s National System of Registration, Tracking and Follow up of Pregnant and Puerperal Women for the Prevention of Maternal Mortality or, for short, MP 557 issued on 26 December 2011, violates women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the autonomy to decide on when to or not to get pregnant, including the right to abortion. The reference to the “unborn child” in the law and the provision of incentives to pregnant women need to be challenged and widely debated for their implication to women’s overall status and empowerment.

Chapter Five of Agenda 21 on Social and Economic Dimensions contain relevant agreements that can be used to test the policy’s alignment with existing human rights guarantees.

Section 5.12 states, “Awareness should be increased of the fundamental linkages between improving the status of women and demographic dynamics, particularly through women’s access to education, primary and reproductive health care programmes, economic independence and their effective, equitable participation in all levels of decision-making.”

Furthermore, section 5.66 states, “The recommendations contained in this chapter should in no way prejudice discussions at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, which will be the appropriate forum for dealing with population and development issues, taking into account the recommendations of the International Conference on Population, held in Mexico City in 1984, 1/ and the Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, 2/ adopted by the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, held in Nairobi in 1985.”

Given existing national legislation and regulation, and the recent CEDAW comments on Brazil, we need to ask how will MP 557 realize this section of Agenda 21. We also need to ask what is happening in many other local places and national contexts in regard to women’s (and men’s) sexual and reproductive rights. For we cannot speak of our “agents of change the subjects who may develop a new way of democratic citizenship from the margins of the ‘establishment’, from the struggle against discrimination,” as Jorge refers to, if we continue to self-regulate our discourses by invisibilizing such inconvenient truths.