.“HOW DID I NOT REALIZE THAT?” Transforming pain into struggle: Feminisms as a way of empowering women who have experienced gender violence.
Feminisms, Feminists, Gender violence, Empowerment.
The present study consisted of knowing the process of empowerment of women who experienced gender violence and found in feminisms a possible way to overcome it. Based on listening to the life history of self-declared feminist women, the research intended, therefore, to identify subjectivities in discovering themselves as feminists, to understand the experiences from the crossings of gender violence and to know which strategies are used to reach other women. . The theoretical articulation involved contributions from bell hooks, Leone Walker, Joice Berth, Cecília Sardemberg, with emphasis on psychologists from the field of feminist psychology Grada Kilomba, Valeska Zanello and Conceição Nogueira. The methodology used was qualitative and data collection was carried out using the life history method with 5 remote interviewees. The data analysis is aligned with Laurence Bardin's content analysis method. The results found in this research confirm that, in fact, feminisms have proved to be a great transforming power in the lives of women with a history of violence, significantly intervening in autonomy, in self-recognition, influencing and enhancing a critical way of thinking, of being and be in the world. Furthermore, the influence of feminist thinking has strengthened the understanding that the personal is also political, and that empowerment is not just an individual process, but mainly, collectively constructed.