ENTREPRENEURSHIP, GENDER AND PRACTICES OF FREEDOM: The entrepreneuring of women who break with the heteronormative
logic of gender
Name: AMANDA SOARES ZAMBELLI FERRETTI
Publication date: 06/12/2021
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ELOÍSIO MOULIN DE SOUZA | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ELOÍSIO MOULIN DE SOUZA | Advisor * |
| PRISCILLA DE OLIVEIRA MARTINS DA SILVA | Internal Examiner * |
| RUBENS DE ARAÚJO AMARO | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: Traditionally, the discourses that circles the entrepreneurship field have focused on market relations and in an individual phenomenon, desirable economic activity, something unquestionably positive. Also presented as an alternative to the economic downturn, especially for women, these discourses contribute to the normalizing (re)production of who can become an entrepreneur, reinforcing a binary gender logic, in addition to making the challenges faced by women in entrepreneurship invisible. However, in recent years, alternative ways of understanding entrepreneurship have contributed to advance the debate on this phenomenon, especially from a critical perspective and from the perspective of subjects traditionally considered marginalized in the literature, including women entrepreneurs who occupy male-dominated market spaces. Therefore, based on the Critical Entrepreneurship Studies (CES), from entrepreneuring, this thesis has the purpose to understand how the discourses related to entrepreneuring of Black female entrepreneurs who have businesses that break with the heteronormative gender logic may create possibilities of resistance towards gender is purpose, I conducted semi-structured interviews
with 14 women entrepreneurs. Subsequently, the data were analyzed using the
Foucaultian Discourse Analysis (ADF). The results showed that entrepreneurial
discourses still position women as the other, in a heteronormative gender logic.
Additionally, in the context and based on the analyzed discourses of the research participants, entrepreneurship is also crossed by intersectionality, contributing to the problematization of how the black entrepreneurial woman and the indigenous entrepreneurial woman are still positioned in the logic of survival, even when they have businesses economically successful. However, these women, by adoption a set of attitudes that differ from traditional behaviors, seek to break with the heteronormativity of entrepreneurship, by understanding the theme not as something fixed and static, but as a process in constant transformation, the entrepreneuring. This alternative way of understanding entrepreneurship leads to practices of freedom, identified in this
thesis as practices of problematization and practices of reflexive affirmation.
