ABSTRACT
In the global imaginary, the vast semi-arid reaches of the Northeast Brazilian sertão, or “backlands,” have long been synonymous with poverty, backwardness, and remote desolation. It is a region that people have traditionally left behind, fl eeing from cyclical droughts, which leave fi elds parched and animal carcasses strewn across barren hills. Th e colonial era remains deeply imprinted on both economic and gender relations there: On the one hand, precarious subsistence farms and cattle-raising latifundia remain linked in semi-feudal relations; on the other, a patriarchal family structure renders women’s back-breaking labor invisible, while strictly controlling both their sexuality and their mobility. It is the fi gure of the rural woman, confi ned within the household and subordinated to male authority throughout her life, that seems best to capture the image of the sertão as a place apparently located somewhere back in time, untouched by the reach of an increasingly globalized civilization.1
