Bridging the local and the global: feminism in Brazil and the international human rights agenda

Social Research, Fall, 2002 by Jacqueline Pitanguy

SOCIETIES have incorporated gender hierarchies into the manner in which they organize power and into their value systems and their social perceptions of what is masculine and what is feminine along different points in history. To redefine concepts whose meanings have crystallized over the centuries into rigid frameworks, to find new ways of exercising power and new spaces where this power can be effected, to stress the links between personal relationships and public organization, and to uncover the emotional mask behind which gender oppression shields itself have been, and remain, the main challenges faced by feminists throughout the world. The extent of their success depends on the strength and power of the women's movement and on macropolitical arrangements at the national and international levels.

In a broad sense, gender relations are the agenda of feminist political action. Gender relations comprise specific issues such as domestic violence, reproductive and sexual rights, and labor, education, and political participation. These issues do not carry the same weight, and are also unevenly distributed in the public's consciousness. The degree to which feminist political action can effect change in these areas is also determined by the influence of institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church, along with traditions and cultural values. As Bourdieu (1992) notes, a law or governmental program expresses not only the dynamic of social forces but also the symbolic systems that allow a logical coordination of public policies.

This article will highlight the role of civil society--especially women's organizations--in reshaping gender relations and influencing human rights language at the national and international level. It will focus mainly on the experience of Brazilian activists and their partners in Latin America's southern cone countries (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Despite the complexity of Latin America and the major differences in race and ethnicity that characterize this continent, the countries in the southern cone have gone through similar political processes in recent decades (Pitanguy and Heringer, 2001: 9). Until the 1960s and early 1970s, they were ruled by democratic civil governments--albeit with workers, nonwhites, and women largely excluded from the sphere of power. In the sixties and seventies, all these countries suffered military coups, and in the eighties and early nineties all saw their democratic systems restored.

The public policies and legislation that have been implemented in Latin American countries reflect the negotiations, pressures, tensions, and alliances that have played out among different social actors in the political arena. Through the use of political parties, social movements, nongovernmental organizations, associations, and unions, these actors fought to have a voice and to be represented in the design of economic and social programs, the formulation of laws and norms, the creation of priorities in public policies, and the distribution of budgetary resources. Current public policies thus express the strengths, influences, exclusions, and conflicts of a game whose dynamics respond to society's structural characteristics and that incorporates conjunctures of specific historical moments

Political Context and Feminism in Brazil

In considering the rise of the women's movement in Brazil, it is essential to refer to the political context of the last 30 years. Although political processes intermingle, for analytical purposes I will distinguish three periods in the recent history of the Brazilian women's rights movements. The first, running from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, marks the appearance of feminism as a political actor and its struggle for legitimacy and visibility. The second period, which occurred in the eighties, is dominated by the inclusion of a feminist agenda in public policies and normative frames. The third, in the nineties, sees the internationalization of this agenda through transnational coalitions that will play a major role in the reconceptualization of human rights language.

In the sixties and the seventies, the struggle for human rights in most Latin American countries was focused on resistance to military dictatorship and defending victims of state-mediated human rights violations. In 1964 a military coup installed an authoritarian regime in Brazil that lasted for 21 years. Less than a decade later, in the seventies, coups dissolved democratic governments in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.

During the 10 years that followed the coup in Brazil, resistance and survival characterized most civil society organizations; they constituted a democratic front with little room for individuation of political agendas. The opposition was committed to forming a broad front under the slogan "People united against dictatorship." These "people," in political terms, had no sex, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

In Brazil, feminism emerged as a political actor in the mid-seventies and had to struggle simultaneously to reestablish democracy and to widen the democratic agenda beyond classical civil and political rights to include gender inequality as a central democratic theme (Pitanguy, 1998: 101). This movement made paramount the need to redefine the very concept of politics itself so as to include the other social relations and power hierarchies that permeate society. Since, for women, democracy refers not only to the full exercise of citizenship in the public sphere but also to the practices of everyday life--work, family, health, sexuality, and education--the actions by Brazilian women to democratize the country were also a struggle to redefine democracy itself (Alvarez, 1990). (The path followed by women's movements in the countries of the southern cone that were also dominated by military dictatorships during this period was similar: they fought to bring women's rights to the public debate and to gain legitimacy within the opposition's democratic front) (Vargas, 1999: 283).