Brazilian Feminism Since the Seventies: Revisiting a Trajectory

Abstract

Based on the Brazilian experience in the last decades, the text approaches feminism as a phenomenon that, although enunciating women’s emancipation in general and abstract terms, concretizes itself in specific social, cultural, political and historical contexts. Initially, the article shows feminism in Brazil, in the seventies, as a women’s movement that was framed in opposition to the military dictatorship. In the following decades, it developed within the possibilities and limits of the process of political democratization. Nevertheless, the text argues that the difficulties faced by Brazilian feminism concerns not only the conjuncture constraints, but are related to structural impasses of feminism, due to the fact that women are not a universal category, except by the projection of our own cultural references. Their cultural and social existence implies diversity and institutes boundaries that cut the world culturally identified as feminine. As such, the analysis of feminism requires the reference to the context of its enunciation, which gives its meaning. Accordingly, the analysis of gender relations implies considering the notion of the person as conceived in the symbolic universe to which they refer.