Artigos

Conteúdo (article):

Women experiencing homelessness in downtown São Paulo and access to food

Sabatini, Fernanda1*, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3037-4447, Email: fer.tini@hotmail.com
Unsain, Ramiro Fernandez2, ID: 0000-0003-3142-0561, Email: ramirofunsain@gmail.com
Sato, Priscila de Morais3, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9850-6859, Email: pri.sato@gmail.com
Torres, Thifany Helena1, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3741-3461, Email: thif.torres@usp.br
Scagliusi, Fernanda Baeza1, ID: 0000-0001-7590-4563, Email:fernanda.scagliusi@gmail.com

1 Faculty of Public Health – University of São Paulo, São Paulo - São Paulo, BR.
2Catholic University of Santos, Santos – São Paulo, BR.
3Federal University of Bahia, Salvador- Bahia, BR
*Corresponding author.

ABSTRACT
Food access involves subjective issues, such as food desires. In addition, involves social, political, and cultural structures. This study focused on examining food access among women experiencing homelessness (WeH). We conducted an ethnographic study between 2018 and 2022 with WeH in central São Paulo, Brazil, and data were analyzed using the Thematic Content Analysis Method. Black feminist theory and socio-anthropological perspectives on food guided the research\'s theoretical, methodological, and ethical approach. Two emic category emerged from the findings about the spaces and ways by which participants accessed food, and their perceptions of this access (\'Bocas de rango\' and \'Bocas de fudê\' ). We concluded that participants developed strategies for Food and Nutritional Security (FNS) based on their food choices, including what they perceived as pleasurable and desirable to experience through food. In this sense, building FNS by and for WeH requires strengthening the possibilities of material, political, and cultural resources that support their autonomous decision-making about what they want to eat, with their pleasures and desires playing a significant role in this process.
Keywords: Food and Nutrition Security; Pleasure; People experiencing homelessness; Decoloniality; Women.

INTRODUCTION
Food access encompasses the relationship between the characteristics of the food environment and the abilities of individuals and groups to desire and be physically, materially, and subjectively able to benefit from that environment¹. In practical terms, food access is conditioned by food prices, types of services available and their location, geographical and resource relationships (such as transportation or income), personal preferences and desires, and life dynamics that hinder or facilitate access to one service or another or to one food or another (including access to donations). From this perspective, access to food involves subjective issues, such as food desire and acceptability, as well as social, political, and cultural structures contextualized to the subjects¹.
We are interested here in considering food access for women experiencing homelessness (WeH), who experience food and nutritional insecurity (FI). FI in Brazil is measured using the Brazilian Household Food Insecurity Scale², based on the experiences of households, and can refer to a lack of food among adults or, in severe cases, among all family members. FI can also refer to changes in the quality and type of food that a family has access to, such as an increase in ultra-processed foods³. WeH are not covered by measurements such as this, as they are not domiciled, and the main information we have on WeH FI comes from censuses, which, to date, have looked at the presence or absence of food in daily life, without discussing gender and race. According to the 2019 census, in the city of São Paulo, 35.3% of people experiencing homelessness (PeH) interviewed responded that they had gone a whole day without eating in the 7 days prior to the survey because they could not get food4. It was the only census that included this question.
The latest estimate of the PeH in Brazil pointed to 236,400 people in this situation5, 22.8% of whom were in the city of São Paulo. Of these, most self-identified as black or brown; and although the majority of PeH in the city self-identify as cis men, 40% of the number of self-reported acts of violence due to being homeless refer to cis women and, mainly, transgender women5. Some social aspects that contribute to PeH experiencing homelessness in a more violent way, and FI, are different exposures to stigmas and violence based on racism, misogyny, and cis-heterocentrism5.
Jussara Campos and Rita de Cássia Akutsu6, based on an integrative review, discussed the interrelationships between Food and Nutritional Security (FNS) and gender, understanding that, according to public policies on Food and Nutrition in Brazil, FNS consists of “regular and permanent access to quality food in sufficient quantities, without compromising access to other essential needs, based on health-promoting food practices that respect cultural diversity and are environmentally, culturally, economically, and socially sustainable”6(Art. 3). The authors point out the importance of looking at women\'s strategies for food access and reinforce the centrality of women as producers of FNS, since their work in agriculture and urban households provides food for their families and the construction of adaptive strategies to obtain food. Although not an exclusion criterion, in the authors\' review, no studies focused on WeH emerged. Rosa and Brêtas7reported experiences of violence experienced by WeH in the city of São Paulo, including violence related to food. The study participants perceived themselves as subject to and imprisoned by rules regarding schedules, coexistence, and ways of eating in spaces such as shelters, where “they were forced to adapt their habits and customs regarding body care, hygiene, food, among others, to the conditions offered by the services and the rules they had”7 (p. 279). Poverty, and consequences such as hunger, are experienced in different ways by the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, among other social markers, and this is linked to colonial elements of modern society9,10 . The capitalist system in countries such as Brazil continues to use colonial elements, such as the cultural and symbolic obliteration of poor women and black people, and these colonial elements permeate the control and disciplining of bodies, both through strict and exclusionary rules of coexistence and through neglect of subjective aspects such as the desires and pleasures of individuals9,10,11. In this sense, the relationship with food and access to food for WeH involves strategies to combat stereotypes and stigmas that lead them to exclusionary and hostile food environments, where their subjectivities are not considered11,12.
Santos et al.13 contributed to the implications of socioeconomic realities on access to food, based on a study with mothers in the urban area of Cruzeiro do Sul in the state of Acre. Although not a study with WeH, the data corroborate the importance of looking at women\'s dietary strategies - especially poor women - as a construction of FNS. In the study, mothers with worse socioeconomic realities developed a greater number of strategies to deal with financial difficulties and the lack of variety of regional foods that were culturally consistent with them; for example, food substitutions, such as vegetables for ultra-processed foods, and shopping outside large supermarkets, but with street vendors who offered convenience, more regional foods, and better prices.
In this sense, what are the possible strategies that WeH develop for food access? And how can this tell us about their FNS construction processes and the scope and depth of the obstacles and potentialities of this process? Considering that food access links subjective dimensions, such as food desire and acceptability1, and that the colonial foundations in Brazil have historically erased and neglected these dimensions for WeH, and that there is a gap in studies in this regard for this population group, we focused on the strategies for access to food that WeH develop in the center of the city of São Paulo on a daily basis, paying attention to the strategies that point to what they consider desirable and coherent as food.
METHODOLOGICAL PROCESS
We conducted an exploratory, descriptive, and qualitative study with an ethnographic perspective. We immersed ourselves and constructed the data in downtown São Paulo, as this is the region with the highest number of PeH in the city according to the latest São Paulo censuses.4,29 The study lasted from 2018 to 2022, during which we carried out different types of data construction, as detailed below.
Data building
We outlined an ethnographic methodological perspective and developed participant and non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews in downtown São Paulo, using a field diary15. During non-participant observations, we observed: interaction between women spending the night in the region with other pedestrians and businesses and the territory in general; donations or sales of food on sidewalks, squares, and under overpasses; and the operation of food services with the presence of PeH, focusing on the presence or absence of WeH. Maria Teresa Anguera15 states that non-participatory observation requires that the researcher does not initiate a relationship with the people being observed, or at least that this interaction does not form the basis for notes and observations. However, this does not imply neutrality on the part of the researcher in the field, and the mere presence of an observer undoubtedly circumvents and impacts the possibilities for local interactions.
We began participating observations at events and public hearings produced by or about the PeH, in the city center, at welcoming services and during meal offerings in the territory, on sidewalks, overpasses, and squares. In addition to the WeH, we developed conversations with members of entities, organizations, and movements linked to the WeH. The approach to potential participants in public places was gradual and informal, with the researcher introducing herself, stating her name, her interest in being there, and the focus of her work. Those who were interested and identified themselves as women who slept in the area were then invited to participate in the research, either through participant observation in their daily lives or through interviews. This approach was intended to be non-coercive and non-invasive, based on Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau14. Participant and non-participant observations were described in a field diary, which served as empirical record material, in which the intersubjective relationships between the researcher, participants, and territories were noted, reflected upon, and reinterpreted, helping us to understand the interpretive advances and setbacks in the field, record ethical dilemmas, and reformulate research questions, as well as serving as a tool to help us generate interpretations and conclusions.
With regard to in-depth interviews, we administered a semi-structured questionnaire between 2021 and 2022. These only began in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with conversations starting informally so that both the researcher and participant could understand each other\'s interests and acceptances. As the participant felt comfortable meeting the researcher again and talking a little more, the interviews took place. The duration of the interviews was not uniform, depending on the participant\'s availability, ranging from 30 to 120 minutes.
The participants
Brazilian PeH is characterized as a heterogeneous group that shares characteristics such as extreme poverty, compromised family ties, and lack of regular conventional housing16. Participants were included based on two criteria: being experiencing homeless and sleeping in shelters or public spaces in downtown São Paulo, and self-identifying as women. Those who had previously been homeless but were living in a home at the time of the study were excluded. In total, 27 participants consented to participant observation, and of these, 13 agreed to in-depth interviews. The consent process is described in the “Ethical issues” section below.
The impacts of Covid-19
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, between March 2020 and September 2020, we followed news produced by entities linked to PeH and maintained contact with entities linked to PeH, without being immersed in the territory. This was done to protect the health of the participants and the researcher. From September 2020, we resumed our visits to the territory to collaborate in the distribution of meals with entities and to continue our observations. During this period, the São Paulo city government adopted the Rede Cozinha Cidadã (Citizens\' Kitchen Network)18 as its main emergency food measure. In the city center, there were three distribution points offering around 2,400 meals per day18,19. It was in these spaces that we began our gradual return to the territory.
Between May 2021 and June 2022, with the vaccination of PeH and health professionals in the city, we began interviews with WeH and increased the frequency of participant observations, always with notes in a field diary. The researcher met with the same participants repeatedly throughout this period (n=27). We left the field (June 2022) due to data saturation19 in relation to the emergence of new content and the repetition of data in the three production fronts (participant and non-participant observations and interviews).
Data analysis
The analysis was performed using the Thematic Content Analysis method21. The categorization process was carried out by two trained researchers. In the first stage, the interviews were transcribed immediately after each conversation, and these transcripts, together with our field diary, were organized in the MAXQDA software, forming our research data. In the second stage, we underlined and highlighted excerpts with similar meanings in the research data, and then, within the context of the statements, excerpts were grouped together. These groupings were named, either with emic or non-emic expressions, reflecting their meanings and giving rise to themes for analysis. After this, we constructed a summarized version of the codebook recommended by MacQueen22. Based on this codebook, the second researcher carried out the categorization process, and both researchers continuously discussed the agreement and reproducibility of the themes constructed and excerpts categorized. The themes that emerged regarding the participants\' strategies for accessing food were discussed in this article. We interpreted the data in dialogue with the socio-anthropology of food and with the epistemologies constructed by black feminism, based, for example, on Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, and other decolonial authors, such as Achille Mbembe.
Ethical issues
For the ethical conduct of fieldwork, we followed Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau14, who raise three questions for ethnographies involving socially vulnerable populations: 1) the positionality of the researcher in the field in relation to the research participants and the territory, highlighting the importance of recognizing and critically reflecting on the privileges of race, gender, sexuality, and class of those who write about the reality they observe; 2) a non-coercive approach in the field, which respects the confidentiality, availability, and willingness of the participants, seeking not to cause embarrassment in their daily lives; and 3) commitment to the ethical treatment, interpretation, and dissemination of data, which does not stigmatize the participants and the territory, considering the positionality of the researchers at this time and the confidentiality of sensitive information.
Along the conversations, the participants\' daily tasks were not interrupted and the researcher made herself available to help with any requests, such as carrying recycling bins or chatting while walking with them on their way to an activity (such as attending a job interview). Given that we work with a population in extreme social vulnerability, the interviews were only recorded with the participants\' consent.
All participants received the Free and Informed Consent Form, which was delivered after a detailed description of the research and recapitulated whenever requested by the participants. The research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Public Health of the University of São Paulo (protocol no. 29137419.9.0000.5421).
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Characterization of Participants
The characterization of participants will be described in this section using emic terms in conjunction with terms studied in the scientific literature, such as the expressions “cisgender women” and “transgender women23,24,25,” “experiencing homelessness16,” and “white, black, and brown women26,27.” Throughout the participants’ statements, these terms helped to standardize the characterization of the interlocutors.
Although they recognized the expression “experiencing homeless” as valid, it was not used by all participants due to the different representations of the term for them. In scientific literature and among movements linked to PeH, the idea of ‘experiencing homelessness\' serves as a theoretical and political umbrella term to group together a heterogeneous set of lifestyles, which are recognized by those who experience them16. Among the expressions that emerged from the field and express the situation experienced, there is \'ser maloqueira\' (being a ‘slum shack dweller’), which, in Pérola\'s perception, is represented by the presence of the the shack, or tent in her case - which provides some kind of support when compared to being on the sidewalk, \'in a street situation\' - a context that is even more vulnerable in her eyes. In addition, there were expressions such as \'sleeping in welcoming services\', when taken in by shelters; or \'staying overnight in the region\', \'being on the street\', or \'staying around\', generally referring to not being taken in by any service and sleeping rough under awnings or on sidewalks.
In relation to gender, self-identification either appeared spontaneously throughout the conversation or was asked as a question to the participant, understanding the non-linearity and fluidity of any aesthetic signs, which are not limited to a binary female/male28,29. Some participants linked their gender responses to sexual orientation, intuiting that being a woman means relating to men—usually cis—and affirming themselves as women based on this criterion. Those who did not identify as cisgender identified themselves as \'trans\' or \'travestis\' or even \'gay women\', and referred to cisgender women living in the streets as \'the other women\' or \'normal women\'. In downtown São Paulo, there is only one shelter for transgender women, which exposes trans women and travestis to the sidewalks30. Of the total number of participants (n=27), 34% identified themselves as trans women, travestis, or “gay women.”
Regarding race, most participants identified themselves as black women (52%), followed by women who did not self-identify their race (33%) and women who self-identified as white (15%). Erroneously, a direct question about race was not included in the participant observations, as it was not considered an issue for inclusion. However, throughout the ethnography, the perception of the historical and political importance of understanding their self-identification regarding race led us to delve deeper into the topic. From that moment on, most self-identification terms emerged as being black. In addition, in one of the statements, self-identification explicitly brought up the intersection of gender with racial self-identification:
Researcher: How do you identify your gender?
Natalina: I am a woman, a woman, black, with curly hair” (Natalina, cisgender black woman).
Finally, we had statements in which racial self-identification came up spontaneously and critically through comparison with the researcher\'s skin color.
I wasn\'t in the field at the time, I was just passing by as a pedestrian [...] after crossing the street, a woman approached me and said, “Hi, beautiful! I know I\'m not beautiful, white like you—she looked at my body—but can you help me buy a sanitary pad? [We started a brief conversation, and she helped me with information about the area] (Field diary, excerpt about Lorraine).
It is important to emphasize that this self-comparison does not stop at skin color, since color—as one of the parameters of race—intersects with class and gender23,7. Furthermore, the intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in the participants\' self-identifications govern a theoretical discussion already well established by black intellectuals and feminists, who emphasize the importance of understanding that these social categories mutually construct the participants\' experiences, and that viewing them in isolation leads to the invisibility of the meanings and significance that these women attribute to life31,7.
Themes of analysis
The data were categorized into two main themes, presented in Figure 1.
“Access to food: places and forms of access to food”
The places where meals were accessed included: 1) donations from pedestrians or social entities, mainly in squares, near subway stations, and under overpasses; 2) meals offered at Temporary Welcoming Centers and community centers in the central region (especially Rede Sefras, the D\'Achiropita social space and the INFOREDES center—called Penaforte by the participants); 3) meals produced in religious community centers; 4) meals offered at emergency distribution points18,32; 5) purchase of meals or individual food items at local stores with money earned from recycling or other jobs; 6) asking local shopkeepers and pedestrians for ready-made meals or money to buy food; 7) cooking their own food, which required other forms of access, such as asking for cooking ingredients and utensils, or buying ingredients with the income from their work.
In emic terms, places where meals were distributed by social, philanthropic, or public entities, as well as places in the territory where entities and NGOs went to donate food on a more regular basis, were called “bocas de rango” (soup kitchens, analogized in this slang expression to "food dens"). It was in these spaces that the participants accessed most of their meals. Figure 2 shows the main “bocas de rango” accessed by the participants.
The “bocas de rango” had set days of operation and a deadline for picking up meals, including a standard schedule for donations throughout the day. Their knowledge of the territory and possible access points was linked to the possibility of not going without an important meal of the day. Each participant moved between different “bocas de rango,” either on the same day or between days of the week, to seek different meals that they considered better, or because they needed to travel around the city for informal work, to search for documents, or for other reasons. For most meals, they preferred to go to food spots closer to where they kept their belongings, for fear that the police would take them if they were not nearby.
The heterogeneity of women\'s experiences of homelessness also consists of different ways of interacting with sidewalks and squares; this is important to note because it is intertwined with ways of accessing food. The participants who spent the night on the sidewalks themselves or under overpasses—in their own tents, cardboard mats, or blankets—had a more permanent relationship with the sidewalks and squares, a relationship of non-transience in Frehse\'s words32. Access to daily food for these women also came more from sidewalks and squares, and thus they identified more with being homeless. The construction of strategies for accessing food took place through interaction with these public spaces. Therefore, pedestrians, \'bocas de rango\', street food vendors, or local businesses became important for access to daily food. In these cases, they needed to interact directly with different spaces, which have different schedules, circulation of people, and rules. This led them, despite the fact that experiencing homeless is recognized as a situation of wandering, to seek a more stable relationship with the territory (spending the night and eating in places already known to them, for example), as less wandering spared them from constantly rebuilding access strategies.
On the other hand, participants who spent the night or even the day in social spaces related to the sidewalks and squares in the city center as places of passage: to go to work or to attend courses and professional training opportunities. Access to meals took place mainly in the welcoming spaces themselves. Sometimes, the distance from the place where they spent the night and the activities they carried out during the day meant that they had to walk long distances within the city and return only to sleep. This journey meant that they had to wait to eat at the welcoming space itself or at ‘bocas de rango’. In both cases, these were ways of eating meals consisting of rice and beans and some other ingredients, without having to ask for them in shops or from passers-by. At other times, they bought ready-made food, including ultra-processed foods such as biscuits, for convenience, hunger, or cravings they felt throughout the day.
Some participants spent the night in religious shelters, which were not hostels, and which provided a kitchen for collective use. The possibility of cooking their own food off the sidewalks gave them a greater sense of security, as well as a greater distance from the perception of being homeless. This means that the ways of accessing food circumvented the participants\' self-identification as being homeless. Some participants said that \'you do not live on the streets, you survive on the streets\'. But this survival was not built without affections and strategies for accessing pleasure and desires. In the next theme, we will detail their perceptions of the places where they access food and the foods they consume.
Figure 1
Figure 2

“Perceptions about the food accessed: The ‘Bocas de rango’ and the ‘Bocas de fudê’.”
Violeta: There [the city where they used to stay overnight], we did it like this: when a truck arrived, we would take the vegetables, the greens, the food that fell and make a buffet for all of us... there they had a fire in a gas can, and there was a lot of food!
Jazmin: Delicious, wow! Boca de fudê! It\'s when there\'s plenty, you know? Plenty of food! Violeta: Yes. There were vegetables, legumes, everything. (Jazmin and Violeta, both black transgender women, Interview)
In contrast to “bocas de rango” (food dens) we also include here, in emic terms, their notions of “bocas de fudê (fucking awesome food den) .” Among the differences between the emic terms presented, there is an important nuance of meaning that differentiates them. The ‘bocas de rango’ are physical spaces where access to daily food tend to occur, whether this food was perceived as more or less desirable, more or less pleasurable. However, ‘bocas de fudê’ are not physical spaces of access, but represent meanings attributed to eating in terms of the perception of delicious, pleasurable, satisfying food. This perception was based both on the variety of food available and the quantity, as well as the experience of eating heartily, at will, serving oneself. The elements surrounding eating at a boca de fudê also appeared in other statements using other terms such as pleasure or desire to “eat at will” or “eat in a buffett format,” “eat heartily/a feast,” also revealing aspects of unlimited quantity and autonomy.
As for the “bocas de rango,” there was dissatisfaction with the taste, variety, and quantity of the food served. However, it was the most readily available means of access to food. In addition, the “bocas de rango” caused discomfort for some participants due to the greater presence of cis men, which made them feel unsafe regarding harassment or physical violence in the queue (pushing and fighting, for example). Some participants also reported not knowing whether they could frequent some of these spaces because, despite sleeping rough at downtown, they had relatives\' homes available to them.
Furthermore, the rules in some public or philanthropic soup kitchens made them feel less autonomous in relation to their own eating, as they had to follow rules regarding when to serve themselves, the amount of food, the time spent in line, the times they could be in line, and coexisting with very heterogeneous groups of people (men, women, elderly people, people who drink alcohol and people who do not drink alcohol, for example). Rosa and Brêtas12 found similar data when researching experiences of violence among the WeH in downtown São Paulo, with reports of feeling like they were in “semi-open prisons” when they frequented places such as shelters. This notion of incarceration can be discussed in light of Michel Foucault11, whose works provide a broad discussion of strategies of discipline in modern capitalist society as devices for the production of power. These strategies involve the homogenization of behavior in institutional spaces as a punitive and disciplinary model for bodies and subjectivities. Discipline stems from the configuration of hierarchical truths and knowledge that sustain power relations, such as that between the oppressor and the oppressed. Mbembé33(2018) introduce complications to this discussion from a postcolonial and colonized countries perspective, showing that power relations in capitalism stem from policies of death, necropolitics, which produce power and sovereignty by producing truths that define who must die and who can kill in societies. The disciplining of bodies, therefore, in a society with colonial roots, such as Brazil, also needs to be discussed in light of the elements of modern capitalism that perpetuate the colonial power project over bodies that have historically been the target of necropolitics, such as WeH.
The concept of “fudê” ("fucking awesome") also shifts the idea of access to food to a socio-anthropological place of sex and lust, via abundance, articulating cultural symbols of sexual/carnal pleasure with the pleasure of food35. The “boca de fudê” subverts the notion of begging and extreme poverty, and of imprisonment to the norms of the “bocas de rango” (food dens). The participants construct subversion both by desiring the pleasure of the “boca de fudê” and by being attentive to opportunities to produce this form of eating (such as picking up food that has “fallen off a truck”). The boca de fudê—even when contextualized within the situation of living on the street—differs from the more common access to food in this situation, which is conditioned by rules, schedules, seasonings, flavors, and foods that are not always consistent with their perceptions of what is tasty and what is not. Amid the limitations of bocas de rango and homelessness, boca de fudê ends up functioning as a political strategy for a momentary escape from the colonial project of material and symbolic precariousness for WeH.
In one of the conversations, Isys, a black cisgender WeH, compares a community center she used to frequent for PeH to a barracks, stating that she no longer goes there because she does not want to be treated as if she were incarcerated: “I\'m not in jail.”
The “bocas” are more than physical spaces for accessing food; they are food spaces where there are different possibilities for relating to food and, with that, perceptions of oneself36. In Isys\' case, the rules of the shelter are reminiscent of prison, of incarceration. The forms of access to food, therefore, communicate relationships, including between the state and the population, and become a continuation of aspects of democratization, health promotion or, as in this case, discipline and biopower11,34. In the same way that sleeping on sidewalks and in squares confers different ways of perceiving oneself subjectively, how/what/how much and where to eat can also generate different notions of self.
It is important to mention that the bocas de fudê did not happen constantly, as opportunities were more difficult to find in downtown São Paulo. Other strategies were part of their routine, also powerful from the point of view of subverting the lack of food that satisfied their desires and pleasures: asking for desired foods and meals, accepting and eating only donations that they considered tasty and suitable for their health, and when possible and accessible, eating at family members\' homes (mother and grandmother). Strategies of agency in pursuit of what they desire and enjoy eating led to the construction of decision-making about their own food. Thinking along the lines of bell hooks37, in this process of agency, the WeH shift the construction of FNS from the hegemonic center of society to the margins of society, to their own decisions; and they shift their subjectivities from ‘margin to center\'.
CONCLUSION
Research on the food consumption of WeH can influence public policies and society\'s view in general, contributing to the deconstruction of historical neglect of people in extreme vulnerability. The contours of access to food by WeH tell us about what they want to eat and about the structural gaps in this access. In addition, the strategies constructed and the meanings given by WeH to access to food show us women as agents of their own eating, who resist the reduction of their food to biological hunger and the reduction of their identities to marginality and precariousness. When WeH build strategies to feel pleasure in eating and persist in their desire for abundance rather than the minimum necessary for survival, they break with stereotypes of begging and marginalization, subverting the neocolonial orders that prescribe Brazil.9,10 The pleasure and subjectivities of the participants were the target of technologies of discipline and power production.11 The “bocas de rango” differ in their sociological dimensions from the “bocas de fudê” due to the different sociocultural interactions between individuals and the processes that produce both (more or less commensality, more or less autonomy, more or less coherence with one\'s own desires and preferences), and due to the representations and meanings that each type of “bocas” carry socially and culturally (one, incarceration; the other, abundance/enjoyment/autonomy, for example). Thus, the pleasure via this feeling of \'fudê\' from the ‘bocas’ desired by the participants is a path of subversion to the order, in which they build non-hegemonic life strategies that, in our understanding, can reflect on paths to FNS - including at the level of public policies, if these pleasures are considered and respected at the center of political discussions.
Finally, the participating WeH produced paths to FNS announcing that the exercise of the right to adequate food goes beyond access to food itself, which would end with the presence of public meal services and meal donations in the territory, for example, but above all to listening to and valuing their food decision-making processes, which includes what they consider pleasurable and desirable. This highlights the need to strengthen the structural, material, political, and financial means that women need to exercise their food choices autonomously and consistently with what they want for themselves, whether they are homeless or not.
FUNDING
This work was carried out with support from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel – Brazil (CAPES) – Funding Code 001 and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) [grant number 304385/2021-2].

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