journeys; setting sails

by Trevor, at Flickr, CC

This is a blog about journeys. About my journey and how it crosses and tangles other women's journeys. It took me a few years to create and decide to maintain a blog in english. This is not my native language and I kept asking myself why would anyone want to hear what a brazilian young activist and sociologist has to say. I never wanted to write exclusively about Brazil, even though I know my life experience as a brazilian may bring insteresting analysis to this project. Why would someone read me?

In fact, I still have no idea. You tell me.

After very tense moments - and very delighful ones, too - in Rio+20, in the World Youth Congress in Istambul, in the World Scout Conference in South Korea and its previous edition in Tunisia; after travelling through Brazil and visiting the US, UK, France, Netherlands and Argentina; after getting married completely in love when I had no expectations of it ever happening to me; after blogging in portuguese for a few years and being able to captivate a not-so-big-not-so-small audience for gender issues; after graduating a diploma and on my way to finish a Master's degree;

it seems I might actually have something to say.

About what?

Women. How do we live? What can we learn from each other? What is gender and how does it affect our lives? What inequalities do we reproduce (without even knowing we're doing it) everyday to other women? What is freedom and how can we build it? What's equality? Is this freer world, where we own our bodies and lifestyles, and make decisions with autonomy, possible? What attitudes do we need to achieve it? Is this important (and how?) if we plan to live, someday, in a fully sustainable society?

I'm afraid to say, though, if you're looking for these answers you might go away and never return to this blog. I do not have them. I do not know them. They might not even exist.

The only question a compass is able to answer is what arbitrary directions correspond to each place in a map or location. It doesn't know where to go, what's the shortest way, how to avoid dangerous routes or if you'd have to climb excessively high mountains to get there. It just says to you: in this arbitrary symbolic scheme, this is where everything stands. It doesn't tell you what to do with that, how to subvert it. But it helps you looking at it to find questions that guide you in doing all those things.

This is what this blog is about.

You're welcome to set your sails and join me.