Emergence of Intersectional Activist Feminism in Brazil: The Interplay of Local and Global Contexts

Abstract

Abstract We consider Brazilian society as a case and evidence for a noteworthy transformation — albeit not unique to Brazil — toward gender equality that has resulted from an evolving interplay of transforming gender relations and women’s participation in feminist as well as in a wide range of other organizations and social movements, enabled by national as well as global contexts. We claim that the transformations of gender and feminisms in Brazil in the last four decades have been intertwined and closely linked to changes in socio-economic structures and political regimes. Gender equality processes advancing institutional, economic, social, and cultural changes have unequivocally resulted from women’s active role in the social and political movements engaged in fighting the military regime in the 1970s, in the transition to democracy in the 1980s (which we call the second wave), and in the democratization of the country in the 1990s (the third wave), as well as from the ongoing processes of growing institutionalization and policymaking (the fourth wave). Throughout the last four decades, feminism has increasingly spread horizontally, creating “horizontal fluxes of feminism,” or, in other words, a perspective that highlights the continuity of gender discrimination, but goes beyond that to equally value the principle of non-discrimination based on race, ethnicity, generation, nationality, class or religion, among others. In fact, we argue that this is a case of increasingly “intersectional feminism.”