Mad Max and the seed advocates: indigenous and peasant women in social movements fighting for sovereignty

Abstract

The objective is to make visible the importance of the struggle of indigenous and peasant women organized in different Latin American figures to defend seeds as a metaphor and construct of sovereignties. Method: Through an intentional apology of the fourth film in Mad Max's apocalyptic saga; Fury Road. From here, characters and scenes from the film are taken up again to portray, on the one hand, the conspiracy between patriarchy, capitalism, food empires, the absolute and militarized control of resources, and environmental crises; on the other hand, to accentuate the Latin American movements of indigenous women, peasants, eco-feminists and heroines who fight for the liberation of those power relations, defending seeds in a metaphorical sense (body-territory, food, safeguarding biodiversity, ancestral wisdom, social justice).  Results: Three aspects stand out in this exercise: resilience to the desolate panorama (famine, environmental and humanitarian disaster) produced by desertification-global warming; the other resistance to overthrow the patriarchal system and its monopolistic practices of power over profits and; the violence associated with the custody of seeds. In each one of these aspects, the internal struggle of women is observed to gain spaces of social visibilization in wider movements like the Via Campesina, or in their own movements like that of Indigenous Women TZ_UNUNIJA, as the protagonist of the film is dramatizing it.  Conclusion: The text emphasizes the murder of some women as consequences of their defenses of seeds and sovereignties.