News from a Personal War: Empowered Women through Labor?
This is my abstract to the response paper I wrote for my writing in the social sciences class. the paper goes on discussing an issue that is not fully addresses in the documentary and that it female role in the favela and how is that connected to the issue of labor...
“News from a Personal War” documentary addresses the life in one of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, Santa Marta, in Brazil. Its principal focus falls on the confrontation between the police attacks and the drug dealers facing that. The dynamics of those showdowns and the impact they have on the residents of the favela is adequately discussed. However, one of the major issues left un-visited is the issue of gender and females’ role in the favela. He who watches the documentary can obviously see the absence of the female perspectives on what goes on in the favela. Only two cases the documentary shows: Janete and Hilda. Both give an account on the female situation inside the favela. Janete’s narrative gives nothing but a desperate image of the women as she recounts the situation of the children in the favela and how uncontrollable it is for their mothers to try and divert the fate of being gangsters and drug dealers at the age of 12. It is clear through the documentary that women are not empowered and they are not able to alter the situation and the lives of their children. Even the children in the documentary are mostly males and there is no case of a female child among them. On the other hand, there is another instance of a working female mother, Hilda, whose condition is not much better than what Janete is talking about. But, her presence in the documentary throws the idea of female labor in the favela. It raises the question of how effective they are in the labor force in the favela whose main labor is dealing with drugs. As it turns out from research, women do have a role in the labor force as they essentially become the provider for their households at the times their husbands are imprisoned for being involved in the police-dealers’ confrontations. Consequently, women find their way in the labor market and usually work as domestics for well of families to try to cope to the precarious lifestyle they lead.