CTB-Web
CTB-Web
Text
Keywords
This text is a translation of the article “Do ‘feminismo popular’ ao ‘feminismo periférico’: mudanças estruturais em contrapúblicos da zona leste de São Paulo”, originally published in 2019.
Introduction
This article presents the results of my doctoral research (MEDEIROS, 2017) in the field of the sociology of social movements and the public sphere, with a focus on women’s associations in the outskirts of the East Zone of São Paulo. The aim of the first stage of my field research was to map the associations, organizations, movements, and collectives fighting for women’s rights in this area. The conceptual framework used relies on the category of discursive matrices, understood as the public spheres that allow for the symbolic re-elaboration of everyday life and the emergence of collective actions against social situations that come to be seen as unjust. The following empirical methods were used throughout the research[1]: 40 semi-structured interviews with members of 36 different civil society initiatives; participant observation at events organized by collectives made up of young women; network analysis of the Facebook pages followed by members of these same collectives; and content analysis of a virtual feminist campaign on the same social network. One of the main elements I observed was the historical complexity of women’s associations in this territory as well as the identification of three different types of organizations: (1) a network of women’s associations that I called “popular feminism”; (2) the partner houses that are part of the Eastern Network for Combating Violence; and (3) a network of collectives that some members call “peripheral feminism.”
“Popular feminism” consists of women’s associations and movements founded in the 1980s and 90s by women born in the 1940s and 60s, based on their experiences in Basic Ecclesial Communities (CEBs), popular urban social movements (struggles for housing, health and daycare), and from membership in the Workers’ Party (PT) at some point in their political career, and/or through organizing with feminist Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) whose main goal was providing legal and psychological assistance to women facing violence.[2]
The Centers for the Defense and Coexistence of Women (CDCMs), on the other hand, are a relatively new type of organizing for women’s rights (originating in the 2000s and growing stronger in the following decade), with services provided in partnership with the Municipal Secretariat for Social Assistance and Development (SMADS) that emerged from “popular feminism.” There is a standard format predetermined by the Secretariat (for example, there is always a manager—or coordinator—a social worker, a psychologist, and a lawyer), and the partner organizations must pass a public hearing process. These partner shelters have a hybrid performance (as both civil society and as a branch of the state) and have started to organize themselves in the form of a network—the Eastern Network for Confronting Violence.[3]
Finally, “peripheral feminism” is made up of collectives which, for the most part, see themselves as feminist and have emerged since 2010, out of the initiative of young women born in the 1980s and 90s, without a defined political structure, rising from the encounter between peripheral cultural movements and debates about feminism on digital social networks. Its main practices are artistic and cultural.[4]
Table 1 – Feminist subfield organizations in the East Zone of São Paulo (non-exhaustive list).
Source: own elaboration based on interviews
This article is structured as follows. The first section establishes a theoretical framework, differentiating and relating the concepts of “[feminist] discursive field” (Sonia Alvarez), “discursive matrix” (Eder Sader), and “[subaltern] counterpublic” (Nancy Fraser). The second section looks at the institutionalization of “popular feminism” towards the CDCMs, while the third section analyses the discursive genesis of “peripheral feminism.” Finally, the concluding remarks compare the discursive matrices of the two kinds of feminist organizing in order to apprehend structural changes in some of the counter-publics (feminist or not) in the East Zone of São Paulo.
1. Theoretical framework: discursive field, discursive matrices and counter-publics
Alvarez (2014a) recently presented a broad, complex and, at the same time, synthetic diagnosis of Latin American feminisms. Instead of talking about “the feminist movement,” the author proposes a “new unit of analysis” by interpreting feminisms as constituting a discursive field of action (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 16). Her approach began to be developed in the 1990s in order to deal with the complexification of Latin American feminist struggles. Alvarez’s (1998) original aim with this concept was twofold: on the one hand, to deny that there was an unbridgeable chasm at the time between feminist NGOs and “the feminist movement” by demonstrating the persistence of common discursive references between the more formalized feminist practices (such as the NGOs of the 1980s and 90s) and the less formalized ones (such as the autonomous collectives of the 1970s and 80s). And on the other hand, to recognize the existence of unequal power relations within this field of social movement. Thus, the concept of a discursive field would simultaneously affirm the multiplicity of spaces for feminist action, their discursive unity and the inequality between social and political actors. When explaining the mature definition of this concept, Alvarez states that “some of the elements that make up a discursive field of action” are:
1) more or less visible, hegemonic, marginalized actors; 2) articulating meshes/webs/networks; 3) nodal points; 4) vertical and horizontal dimensions, and perhaps density; 5) defining discourses; 6) interpretative struggles/constitutive conflicts; and 7) transformative paradoxes (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 46).
Alvarez (2014a) then presents three moments in the trajectories of Brazilian and Latin American feminisms.
The first moment is characterized by the “centering” of the discursive field of action and the configuration of “feminism in the singular.” From the 1970s onwards, a “central component […] of the shared political grammar that articulated the incipient feminist field” was the dichotomy of “general struggle-political militancy” versus “specific struggle-autonomous militancy” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 22). The “constitutive exterior” of the camp at this time was mainly left-wing political parties and groups, many of them revolutionary. In addition to valuing autonomy, the “founding feminists” were in the field of opposition to the military dictatorship, organized themselves into collectives and regularly held street demonstrations. This “specific struggle” became a feature of hegemonic feminism at this time; however, for many women, it was “deeply marked by social class, heteronormativity, and an ‘unnamed’ or implicit whiteness that constituted a backdrop” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 23). [5]
The second moment is characterized by the decentralization and pluralization of feminisms, as well as the mainstreaming of gender. While before, the main form of organization was through autonomous collectives, in the 1990s one of the main articulating nodes of the feminist field was through NGOs, with “permanent headquarters, significant budgets, specialized departments and paid staff.” The “transnationalized, professionalized and specialized” NGOs came to form “a hegemonic core of the feminist field” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 26). This new moment also saw a repositioning of various actors “beyond civil society”; the author calls this a “vertical articulation,” in other words, towards political society and the state, as well as electoral parties, governments, universities and international institutions such as the UN and the World Bank. Another articulating node, also located “beyond civil society,” specific to the Brazilian feminist field, was the Workers’ Party (PT), together with trade unions, the landless movement, popular movements linked to the Catholic Church, and student movements, as well as feminist groups within the party’s municipal and state administrations (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 27–28).
Finally, the third (and current) moment is marked by the multiplication of feminist fields and side streaming (horizontal flows) within these plural feminisms. Some of the articulating discourses are “inequality” (especially racial inequality, which is becoming more central for younger activists, leading to new fields such as black feminism) and “autonomy.” Even though black, young and grassroots women have achieved great visibility recently, certain characteristics of the second moment have continued: transnational NGOs are still strong, and feminist and/or gender studies centers at universities are even more consolidated. If those specialized and professionalized NGOs were an articulating node in the second moment, now the state itself must be considered one of the “main articulators of the Brazilian [feminist] field today” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 44), with National Conferences on Policies for Women (in 2004, 2007 and 2011) and what some authors are calling “participatory state feminism” or “institutional activism” (ABERS; TATAGIBA, 2015). The author points out that the technocratic absorption of gender issues by governments and international institutions, as well as the “NGOization and transnationalization of feminist advocacy,” have led to more inequalities, conflicts and, ultimately, to “new paradoxes that have driven changes in the feminist field in the region [of Latin America]” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 32).[6] This notion of “transformative paradoxes” is not explored in depth, but it could yield interesting explanatory hypotheses for the dynamism of the feminist field, as the author herself alludes to in another article: “paradoxes are what drive movements” (ALVAREZ, 2014b, 73).[7]
Another conceptual framework is that of autonomy. After the processes of institutionalization (“vertical flows”), feminism seems to be experiencing a “return” to the 1970s (organized around autonomous collectives). There is both criticism of the commitment to the formulation and implementation of public policies and a “material disincentive to more ‘institutionalized’ formats” due to the displacement of international cooperation “to other parts of the ‘Global South’ as a result of the much-celebrated (and perhaps short-lived) Latin American growth of the 2000s” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 36). Institutional politics, public management and funding such as that from the Ford Foundation are re-evaluated as insufficient for the feminist struggle. An example of how autonomy becomes an articulating discourse in the field is how it is articulated by extremely heterogeneous strands of “young feminism,” such as anarcho-autonomists, militants from Trotskyist parties (like the PSTU), but also the World March of Women (coordinated by the NGO Sempreviva Feminist Organization and linked to a PT tendency), regardless of their pluralities, contradictions and conflicts. The multiplication of feminist struggles and their horizontal flows would therefore be the main hallmarks of the profound process of complexification of contemporary feminisms in Latin America.
The “main theoretical debt in formulation” of the notion of a discursive field of action “is with the Brazilian literature on ‘ethical-political’ fields,” such as the works of Sérgio Baierle, Ana Maria Doimo and Eder Sader (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 16). Gabriel Feltran (2005) adds that, in addition to these authors, Alvarez and Dagnino also developed the category of political field, bringing it closer to Sader’s concepts of discursive matrices and Nancy Fraser’s counterpublics.[8] However, I argue that Alvarez’s own category of discursive field can be better understood and operationalized by not reducing it to a synonym for discursive matrix and counterpublic (although the concepts can and should be related).
Sader developed the category of discursive matrices during his study of social movements and of the participation of the working class in the Brazilian public arena during the 1970s. Sader was concerned with the emergence of new meanings, in other words, the way in which subjects attribute new meanings to their daily lives, reworking them symbolically.
Subjects are not free to produce their discourses, nor can they invent their communication systems on the spot. They resort to constituted discursive matrices and, in the first place, to the matrix of the instituted culture itself, reproduced through a plurality of social agencies. But we find agencies in society which, although they participate in the established culture (a condition for social communication), express practices of resistance and projects of rupture. They constitute new forms of social agency, which open up space for the elaboration of experiences that were hitherto silenced or interpreted in another way. Discursive matrices must therefore be understood as ways of approaching reality, which imply different attributions of meaning. As a result, they also imply the use of certain categories of naming and interpretation (of situations, themes, actors) as well as reference to certain values and objectives. But they are not simply ideas: their production and reproduction depend on the material places and practices from which they are spoken (SADER, 1988, 142–143).
As discourses are inseparable from their “material places and practices,” Sader was interested in discovering “centers of discursive elaboration” that would enable the working classes to rearticulate their own experiences. This rearticulation would be nothing more than a symbolic mediation between objective social structures and collective actions: a process of attributing new meanings to the conditions of existence experienced by subjects. Discursive matrices can thus be understood both in terms of their institutional character and by the fact that they constitute (often informal) public spheres that can be understood as networks of sociability which, through intersubjective social interaction, can contribute to the critical and reflective reframing of everyday life and allow for collective actions to emerge.
In his empirical study of four popular movements—the Movimento de Custo de Vida, the Oposição Metalúrgica de São Paulo, the Movimento de Saúde da Zona Leste, and the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos de São Bernardo—Sader identified three discursive matrices: Liberation Theology, Marxism and the new unionism. The three discursive matrices share the fact that they all emerge from within institutions—what Sader had previously referred to as the “instituted culture”—in crisis: (i) the Catholic Church; (ii) the revolutionary left; and (iii) the trade union structure. Each specific crisis is interpreted as the genesis of new practices—what Vera Telles referred to as “instituting practices.” These new practices gradually become institutionalized—an approach consistent with Berger and Luckmann’s (1983) phenomenology, according to which “objective reality [is understood] as the result of social actions that have become objectified” (SADER, 1988, 47). Each of the three examples bring about social places from within which discourses are articulated: (i) Basic Ecclesial Communities; (ii) clandestine organizations and newspapers; (iii) trade unions that are part of the state institutional system but which seek to reconnect with their bases. These discourses are aimed at an audience of listeners for whom these speeches may or may not resonate. Finally, Sader is interested in identifying the themes and enunciations that emerge from these institutionalized practices, since their content enables symbolic re-elaborations of popular experiences, which is fundamental for the emergence of the social movements Sader analyses in the last chapter of his book.
What interests me the most is the interpretation that Sader’s category of discursive matrices can be better understood from the (initially Habermasian) concept of the public sphere, which it is possible to trace by following how the notions of “public” and “publicity” appear in each of the three discursive matrices (MEDEIROS, 2017, 98–100).[9]
Fraser’s critique of Habermas is useful for the purposes of my research: in order to update Sader’s theoretical framework—public spheres as discursive matrices—in view of the specificities of feminism. At first, Fraser recognized the importance of the Habermasian category of the public sphere for a critical theory of the “limits of democracy in societies of late capitalism” (FRASER, 1992, 109). Although Fraser argues that Habermas’ idea of the public sphere is indispensable for critical social theory because it designates a discursive arena that is irreducible to the state or the market, it nonetheless remains unsatisfactory. Based on a revisionist historiography of women’s participation in the public sphere (mainly the works of Joan Landes and Mary Ryan, but also Geoff Eley), Fraser questions the bourgeois and masculinist conception of the public sphere as described by Habermas. In view of these criticisms and that historiography of public spheres, Fraser proposes the concept of subaltern counterpublics:[10]
This historiography records that members of subordinate social groups—women, workers, people of color and gays and lesbians—have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics. I propose calling them subaltern counterpublics to point out that they are parallel discursive arenas in which members of subordinate social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs. Perhaps the most notable example is the subaltern feminist counterpublic in the United States at the end of the 20th century, with its varied arrangement of newspapers, bookstores, publishing houses, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals and local meeting places. In this public sphere, feminist women have invented new terms to describe social reality, including “sexism,” “the double shift,” “sexual harassment” and “marital rape.” Armed with this language, we reformulated our needs and identities, thereby reducing, though not eliminating, the extent of our disadvantage in official public spheres (FRASER, 1992, 123; my emphasis).
Such “alternative publics” or “parallel discursive arenas” through which “contradiscourses” and “oppositional interpretations” are produced and then circulated are conceptualizations that are very close to what Sader called discursive matrices because both have the function of inventing a new language and “new terms to describe social reality” in order to reformulate—symbolically re-elaborate, Sader would say—”needs and identities.”
I argue that the best way to articulate the concepts presented above is as follows: the discursive field arises from a growing intertwining between subaltern counterpublics and dominant publics[11] (ALVAREZ, 1998, 316). Discursive matrices, on the other hand, function as an analytical category that captures sociocultural processes in which certain counter-publics play the role of providing oppositional discourses that facilitate the emergence of collective actions. Each category has a specific productivity: while the notion of discursive field serves to point out the sharing of common references for multiple different practices, the notion of discursive matrix serves to point out the diversity of institutions that differentially contribute to social movements in the production and circulation of “oppositional codes” (see HALL, 1999).[12]
With the conceptual reference of a feminist discursive field, it is possible to ask whether what I called two political cycles in my thesis (MEDEIROS, 2017, 46–50), inspired by the political process theory of Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam—namely”popular feminism” and “peripheral feminism”—cannot be better interpreted as historical moments of the same feminist (sub)field in the East Zone of São Paulo. Following Alvarez, this would avoid focusing only on the “ebbs and flows” of the movements, shifting focus to the permanent but dynamic nature of feminist mobilization. This notion of field (even if territorialized regionally as a sub-field) can be useful to cover some phenomena that Alvarez (2014a) also analyses, such as “articulating nodes” and “vertical flows” (from civil society towards political society, from subaltern counterpublics towards their imbrication with dominant publics). In this way, it would be productive not only to consider the associations and movements of the first cycle/moment on the one hand, and the collectives of the second cycle/moment on the other. It would also be necessary to account for the main vertical flow identified, namely the development of “popular feminism” towards institutionalization, in the form of the CDCMs. And also consider the simultaneous emergence of the Eastern Network for Confronting Violence and the peripheral feminist collectives, which led me to think of their relationship from the point of view of transformative paradoxes. These steps make it possible to propose a unified narrative about the internal dynamics of the feminist subfield in the East Zone of São Paulo.
2. “Popular feminism”: from counter-publics to publics (vertical flows)
The network of popular feminist associations in the East Zone of São Paulo shares several characteristics with the social movements that Sader analyzed. I identified three institutions with respective spaces of sociability as discursive matrices of “popular feminism”: (1) the Catholic Church, in its progressive strand of Liberation Theology and the spaces of the Basic Ecclesial Communities (CEBs); (2) NGOs belonging to the feminist movement, founded mainly in the 1980s and 90s, whose headquarters are not located in the East Zone, but carry out grassroots work in peripheral neighborhoods; and (3) the “world of carnival,” with its samba schools and Afro blocks, both in the Center and scattered throughout the East Zone, as a space of resistance for black culture. It is also important to note that all the interviewees from each of these groups are[13] or were[14] affiliated to the Labor Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT).
Four of the popular feminist associations emerged from within the CEBs, and the activists interviewed emphasized the importance of Liberation Theology in shaping their worldview and political action.[15] In the interviewees’ statements, there are two meanings attributed to the CEBs and the Catholic Church that can be understood as characteristic of a subaltern counterpublic: on the one hand, a space for sociability and leisure, and on the other, a space for political formation. A former member of the São Mateus Collective explains that, with no leisure options on the periphery (during the 1980s), the church “was the meeting point”;[16] but as the CEBs were a place that “made prayer into action,” as well as being a meeting place, they were also “a space for people to reflect.” The president of Amzol, in turn, explains that with “women inside the churches,” “spaces were created for people to talk,” in other words: to share their stories, how they arrived in this dormitory neighborhood, to point out what was lacking there and, in this way, to fight to make up for these shortcomings. In addition to finding “human warmth in the church,” all the women interviewed were unanimous in pointing out the formative nature of their participation in Catholic communities; they even attributed to the CEBs what was most fundamental in their militant trajectories: while the founder of Casa Lilith said “I was formed by the CEB discussions,” the activist from the São Miguel Movement (and current director of MSZL) asserted that “the strength I have within the movement, I acquired from the Church of Dom Angélico.”[17] According to the president of Amzol, “Dom Angélico was a revolutionary bishop.” In the case of the São Mateus and Vila Prudente neighborhoods (the same district where the Vila Alpina neighborhood is located and where Casa Lilith’s activities were carried out), the person responsible for carrying out these same guidelines was Dom Luciano Mendes de Almeida, who was in charge of the Belém Episcopal Region, which remains directly linked to the Archdiocese of São Paulo to this day. As the founder of Casa Lilith explains, the CEBs were a “space that gave us a lot of strength and knowledge to face the military dictatorship” and “people grew a lot in the process.” In the discourse of these associations I was able to identify a tensioning of Liberation Theology towards a Feminist Liberation Theology (TOMITA, 2004).
The “centers of discursive elaboration” of the direct feminist discursive matrix are the “central feminist NGOs,” with headquarters located in the central region or in the West Zone of the city of São Paulo.[18] In the same way that the discursive matrix of the formerly revolutionary left, analyzed by Sader, provided Marxist theoretical explanations for the pastoral and popular movements, it is the articulation of the NGOs, constituting a subaltern feminist counterpublic,that provided feminist and gender-based rationales for the women’s associations of the East Zone. The relationship between theory and practice was experienced by the militants of “popular feminism” through the attribution of an external character to feminist theory.[19]
There was an ongoing collaboration between the Sempreviva Feminist Organization (SOF) and the World March of Women (MMM), bolstered by the fact that until the mid-1990s, SOF had its headquarters in a house in São Miguel (where Amzol’s headquarters also operated for a while). In addition, Amzol’s activities since its inception in the early 1980s were largely action-research projects pertaining to the Women’s Education Network (RME) (VIEZZER, 1989). In the 1990s, Amzol was part of the first course for the People’s Legal Prosecutors (PLPs), promoted mainly by the Union of Women of the Municipality of São Paulo (UMSP) (RICOLDI, 2005), which was instrumental to the opening of the Maria Miguel Legal Center in 1996. As for the Lilith Women’s House, the longest-lasting collaboration was with the Feminist Collective for Sexuality and Health (CFSS—COLETIVO FEMINISTA SEXUALIDADE E SAÚDE, 2000), with whom Vila Alpina activists published the biannual magazine Enfoque Feminista and helped with the bimonthly newsletter Lilith Informa. Finally, the organizations that innovated by explicitly addressing the struggles of black women, maintained alliances and partnerships with the central feminist NGOs that were pioneers in black feminism: the NGOs Geledés and Fala Preta (CARLOS, 2009; SANTOS, S., 2008) sent funding notices to Dandara (and Fala Negão / Fala Mulher!), while Oriashé promoted two PLP training courses in Cidade Tiradentes in collaboration with Geledés.
It is precisely in the latter examples, focused on the issue of race, that we see a kind of replacement of the Catholic discursive matrix within “popular feminism.” While in the majority of cases there is a connection between Liberation Theology and the “central feminist NGOs,” in the Espaço Lilás and Dandara, in place of the CEBs, the connection was made through”the world of samba”and carnival. Furthermore, the leaders interviewed are not Catholics but Candomblé practitioners.[20] As the interviewee from the Dandara Cultural Group explains, it was samba that gave her her racial identity, mainly because of the samba school she attended in Vila Formosa, a district in the East Zone. In the case of Oriashé (whose official name is “Oriashé – Sociedade de Cultura e Arte Negra”), the organization that later created Espaço Lilás, it was originally one of the first Afro blocos composed only of black women, founded at the end of the 1980s in Bixiga, in the central region of São Paulo (CASTRO, 2008; MENDONÇA, 1993). With the departure of one of the founders from Bixiga to Cidade Tiradentes (the interviewee, who was also a militant of the MNU-Movimento Negro Unificado), the women who remained in the Bixiga created, a few years later, the Bloco Afro Ilú Obá de Min (SOUZA, 2014). If we consider the Fala Negão / Fala Mulher! association (with its mixed membership), its origins equally lie in the world of carnival. One of the main organizations that took part in its foundation is Leandro de Itaquera, a samba school with a large black membership and a critical approach to race (OLIVEIRA, K., 2002).
In their connection with different organizations of the black movement, the samba schools and Afro blocks constitute a black counter-public:[21] spaces of sociability in which culture is experienced as the basis for the construction of racial identity and as black resistance; it is from these senses and meanings that a number of the militants of “popular feminism” have been able to outline practices and discourses that make the specific issues of black women visible.[22]
The genesis of “popular feminism” lies in the combined articulation of these three counter-publics presented above. Gradually, these women’s associations themselves not only constitute a new counter-public—”popular feminism”—but also start to develop vertical flows towards dominant publics (especially São Paulo City Hall, through the creation of new NGOs), which allows us to characterize this process of complexification and institutionalization of feminist practices in the East Zone as the emergence of a feminist discursive subfield.
The main collective action repertoire of popular feminist associations—legal and psychological assistance to women in situations of violence—began to be institutionalized in the 1990s. The first step was Amzol’s agreement with the São Paulo State Attorney General’s Office (PGE-SP), and the creation of the Maria Miguel Legal Center in 1996 as a result of the PLP training course, which provided free legal assistance to about 18,000 women in less than 10 years. From the Marta Suplicy government onwards (2001–04; then in the Labor Party), there was an increase in the vertical flow through the public social assistance policy. [23]
The seven CDCMs in the East Zone[24] have two historical founding moments: the “first generation” (Casa Cidinha in 2002, and Casa Viviane in 2004, both under the Suplicy administration)[25] and the “second generation” (all from 2012, at the end of the administration of Mayor Gilberto Kassab: Casa Anastácia, Casa Zizi, MulherAção, and Maria da Penha—with the exception of Naná Serafim, inaugurated in 2013, in the first year of Fernando Haddad’s administration). Today, these CDCMs are part of the Eastern Network for Combating Violence, alongside other organizations.[26]
More than half (4) of these CDCMs have the Catholic Church behind them: Associação Padre Moreira (in the case of Casa Cidinha), AVIB-Associação de Voluntários Integrados no Brasil (in the cases of Casa Viviane and Casa Anastácia), and CIAP[27] São Patrício (in the case of Casa Zizi). These three organizations had some initial relationship with the CEBs in their respective regions, either in the 1980s or 90s: Padre Moreira in the São Rafael and São Mateus districts, AVIB in the Guaianases and Lajeado districts, and CIAP São Patrício in the Sapopemba district.
In the case of the other CDCMs, there was no religious influence, Catholic or otherwise: Casa de Isabel, an NGO fighting violence against women founded in 1996, Rede Criança de Combate à Violência, an NGO started in 1998 with political links to the Brazilian Communist Party, and Instituto Social Santa Lúcia, originally a Residents’ Association in the Jardim Ângela district, South Zone of São Paulo, created in 2000.
It’s important not to overlook the fact that the CDCMs were civil society initiatives: the São Mateus Women’s Collective is at the origin of Casa Cidinha and the “Open your eyes Companheira!” Movement in Guaianases resulted in Casa Viviane (CORREIA, 2015; SILVA, 2014). The institutionalization of women’s movements through formal agreements with SMADS can be interpreted as hybridity: the women’s group becomes an arm of the government and, at the same time, an integral part of the mobilization of civil society. However, the interviews I conducted show that this hybrid character is not experienced in the same way by each of the partner houses, revealing not only different historical origins but also different political and social principles.
In recent years, empirical research has begun to emerge on some of the CDCMs—Casa Viviane (LADEIRA, 2013; PINTO, 2016), Casa Anastácia (MARTINS, 2015), Casa Viviane and Casa Anastácia (CORREIA, 2015), Casa Cidinha (SOUZA, 2015), and PLPs at São Mateus Hospital (LORENZO, 2012; SOUZA; MACEDO; FERNANDES, 2014).
A recent article by Cecília MacDowell Santos (2015) is probably the first analysis that covers the Eastern Network as a whole. In addition to the merit of providing a broader view than the case studies mentioned above, a second positive aspect of this work is the search for a complex analysis that is capable of detecting the heterogeneity of what she calls the state’s legal-political culture. The author thus maps out different approaches or perspectives on violence against women, which she calls: “familist,” “gendered,” “feminist” and “intersectional of gender, race and class,” and which, in the terms of a current of social movement theory, might be called frames, i.e. interpretative frameworks. However, a limiting aspect of the work lies in its methodological proposal of an “ethnography of the state” which, in my opinion, ends up obscuring the historical process of the emergence of CDCMs from within civil society. My choice, in this article and in my thesis, was to refuse an ethnography of the state that sought to map the political culture of state agents, but rather to adopt a political ethnography that is capable of grasping practices that are often informal, such as the counter-publics built by the women themselves. Thus, I argue that the diversity of actors, repertoires and discourses only becomes fully comprehensible when the history of social struggles is given centrality. [28]
It is also interesting to note, albeit superficially (as it is based only on interviews with coordinators and social workers and not on participant observations of the day-to-day life of the partner houses, which I did not carry out), that the CDCMs interviewed do not merely play a welfare role, nor do they focus solely on the criminal aspect of the Maria da Penha Law, the legal framework against gender-based violence (the “D” for defense[29]), but all have a strong emphasis on the sociability among women (the “C” of coexistence), and play a relevant role in popular legal education, educating women about their rights with regard to their own homes, children, pensions, etc. If we approach education from the perspective of non-formal education, i.e. building a democratic political culture (GOHN, 2011), then the CDCMs appear as eminent educational spaces.
The emergence of the CDCMs and their expansion as a service favored by Social Assistance to contribute to the implementation of the Maria da Penha Law is closely linked to the development of “popular feminism,” since some of the women’s movements ended up disappearing when they were channeled into the implementation of the agreement, or other women’s associations that didn’t want to, or couldn’t adapt to the inevitable restrictions by SMADS, found themselves in a difficult situation in terms of financing and maintaining their headquarters and ongoing activities–what I call a prolonged sustainability crisis.[30]
3. “Peripheral feminism”: new counter-publics (horizontal flows)
In this section, I will present the two discursive matrices that I have identified for “peripheral feminism”: in the place of the CEBs (and, to a lesser extent, the popular culture of samba and carnival), the peripheral cultural movements; and in the place of the network of feminist NGOs based in the center-west region of São Paulo, the feminisms of the digital counterpublics.
While the popular feminist associations emerged alongside or from within urban popular movements (such as the struggles for housing, health and daycare), the peripheral feminist collectives emerged mainly within cultural movements, such as the peripheral saraus and the Hip Hop movement. The growing peripheral cultural circuit has, in a way, replaced the role that the CEBs played in the 1970s and 80s, in terms of establishing a decentralized network for the circulation of discourses and political training, as well as providing “spaces for coexistence formed by everyday encounters in the city” (SADER, 1988, 118).
In a second comparison, if “popular feminism” had social assistance (and other public policies to make women’s rights effective) as its main focus of dialogue with the public authorities, in the case of “peripheral feminism” the dialogue is now with cultural public policy. When there is any state funding for their activities (many of them are self-financed or based on unpaid work), it is almost exclusively through the VAI Program, run by the Municipal Department of Culture. These feminist collectives don’t have their own headquarters, but usually occupy state public facilities (municipal library, cultural center, educational center) or non-state facilities (community library, culture point).
The hip hop movement and peripheral soirees can be conceptualized as a whole as a literary (or artistic-literary) counter-public, with its records, producers, record labels, books, independent and alternative publishers, zines, events, parties, meeting points, websites, blogs, Facebook pages, etc. There is a growing number of books of peripheral/marginal literature and rap CDs produced by women and, increasingly, authors, songwriters, readers and listeners share social spaces and artistic, cultural and discursive references, forming a real public: the soil from which peripheral feminist collectives emerge.
However, women are still a minority in the artistic-literary counter-public, but the reality starts to change over the course of the 2010s. Teresa Caldeira (2014) points to this growing female participation in peripheral culture, whether in Hip Hop or saraus (soirees), but this process is marked by tensions, ambiguities and contradictions, which trap women either in “masculinization” or in “essentialized femininity.” Recent master’s dissertations (BALBINO, 2016; RAMOS, 2016) empirically demonstrate the increase in female participation in these cultural movements, as does my fieldwork.
In the case of Hip Hop, some milestones regarding the involvement of women in the movement are: the Rappers and Femini Rappers Projects (proposed by Geledés in the 1990s), the “Minas da Rima” group, the “Women in Hip Hop” website and the National Front of Women in Hip Hop-FNMH2 (RAMOS, 2016). Ramos’ ethnographic research provides many elements that complexify the relationship between feminism and women in hip hop beyond the dichotomy pointed out by Caldeira between masculinization vs. essentialized femininity. On the one hand, the involvement of women is due to the necessity of finding balance “between necessarily having to display a certain femininity, but without it being read as too sensual or erotic” (RAMOS, 2016, 100). The exacerbation of femininity can be condemned by men and women alike (both operating in an opposition between “thinking women” and “objectified female bodies,” a criticism directed in part at funk music) but the exacerbation of masculinity is read as homophobic (although very recently, feminist rappers and lesbian rappers have expressed themselves artistically and politically against and beyond these sexist and homophobic structures). On the other hand, hip hoppers actively dialogue with each other and with foreign hip hoppers about feminism, “white feminism” and black feminism, based on a “demand to ‘peripherize’ feminism” (RAMOS, 2016, 80; my emphasis).
In the case of saraus (soirees) and peripheral literature, one of their inaugural milestones is the launch of volumes dedicated to literature from the periphery (organized by the writer Ferréz and published by the magazine Caros Amigos). In the three editions published between 2001 and 2004, the participation of women was “negligible”: only 16.1% (BALBINO, 2016, 32 and 102). The absence of gender equality in collections and anthologies of marginal/peripheral literature continued throughout the 2000s, changing only when peripheral women writers began to self-organize to publish collections 100% made up of women, such as the book Águas da Cabaça and the collections Perifeminas I: nossa história, Pretextos de Mulheres Negras and Perifeminas II: sem fronteiras (BALBINO, 2016). The 2010s saw a significant quantitative change in the division of authors by gender (BALBINO, 2016, 109–10): the participation of women writers surpassed that of men writers from 2013 (47.0%) to 2014 (56.7%). In addition to the emergence of women’s collectives and collections, the publication of books resulting from cultural movement and workshops in public schools contributed to this new role for women (BALBINO, 2016).
Some interviews indicated that the soiree was a space where machismo was less intense than in other social spheres. Other interviews contradict this, telling stories of prejudice, discrimination, and machismo, revealing power relations in which men occupy a privileged and oppressive position. Hip Hop culture is seen as sexist, both in rap: “extremely dominated by men,” as one of the members of Mulheriu Clã put it, and in graffiti: members of the M.A.N.A. Crew reported suffering discrimination, having their work devalued and moved to a less prominent wall, and even “abusive looks” from men, a situation described as uncomfortable, awkward and disturbing. Suffering sexist violence culminated in women deciding to leave mixed collectives and seeking out women-only organizations. A few months after the first interview I conducted, one of the collectives broke up with the peripheral soiree which it was part of, due to several sexist episodes involving a poet.
The growing presence of women in these cultural movements has enabled a solidarity that strengthens and feeds back into women’s occupation of more and more spaces, with already established collectives opening doors for younger and less articulate women, either by indicating ways of financing cultural projects via public notices, or by providing organizational and emotional support to those who arrive on the cultural scene later, or by inspiring the adoption of previously unknown or inconceivable repertoires, based on their daily example.
These cultural movements are certainly the most relevant space of sociability for the genesis of the feminist collectives analyzed here, the main basis of formation and the soil from which they emerge. It is mainly in these artistic and cultural movements that the basic, dense, and significant sociability of which Magnani (2003, 113) spoke is developed today, the “intricate network of relationships” from which identities are attributed to the different quebradas (group struggles)—a native category that today updates the old notion of “piece” (MAGNANI, cited inSADER, 1988, 120-121). However, I have witnessed horizontal flows towards feminist (sub)counterpublics within this peripheral literary counterpublic due to the machismo that structures it. In this sense, the articulation between class and race expressed by the native category “peripheral” is further enriched by the social marker of gender, resulting in the gendering of what D’Andrea (2013) called the “peripheral subject,” towards the notion of peripheral women.
The second discursive matrix of “peripheral feminism” is the feminisms of the digital counter-publics. While “popular feminism” was marked by the mediation of “external” feminist technical advice (in the form of NGOs based outside the East Zone), a characteristic of this new historical moment is the crucial role that the internet now plays in democratizing direct and immediate access to the production, circulation, and reception of feminist debates and texts. In interviews, the young activists pointed to the internet as a relevant element, as in this case from a member of the Juntas na Luta collective:
[…] this boom in peripheral feminism, you know? Women learning about transphobia in a Facebook discussion group, regardless of whether they’ve been to university or not. I also think this is a step forward, you know? The fact that the subject is being discussed more widely, you know? This is the result of the feminist movement.
The bibliography on “digital feminism,” “cyberfeminism” or “communicational feminism” (VALENTE; NERIS, 2018) is still poorly systematized. Some objects are even much more targeted (such as different SlutWalks or “Feminist Bloggers”) and other research issues—such as blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and other virtual spaces central to black feminism—receive less attention from researchers.
One exception is Modelli’s thesis (2016), which compares Blogueiras Feministas and Blogueiras Negras, blogs she sees as “spaces for conversation.” The author points out that the internet has an ambiguous character: on the one hand, it can reinforce inequalities and gender violence; on the other hand, it constitutes a new “communicational space” that enhances new feminist collective actions in opposition to the silencing and stereotyping typical of traditional mainstream media. Digital feminist counterpublics can be interpreted as a discursive matrix of “peripheral feminism” based on the way in which sharing personal narratives helps to build a collective identity (MODELLI, 2016, 87). Sharing “autobiographical stories” is an action that allows for a symbolic reworking of everyday life and the recognition of patterns of oppression, domination, and exploitation that can be fought against, rather than experiences that are presented as isolated, localized, and purely individualized, which tends to hide the social processes that produce them. In addition, digital social networks allow young people’s sociability to expand exponentially: the internet is a place to meet, to start friendships that make it possible to found collectives, what Castells (2015) calls “connected individualism.”[31]
With this in mind, I carried out a quantitative analysis of the network of Facebook pages that are followed by the activists I interviewed. After mapping the “liked” pages related to feminist and women’s rights debates, at the end of July 2016, I listed 828 pages from 24 personal profiles of activists (belonging to seven collectives). The degree of diversity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation ofthe opinion-forming process in digital counterpublics is surprising. It was very common to notice that pages that could be of interest to several activists had only one “like,” revealing the extremely decentralized nature of discussions on the internet. The network analysis (applying an algorithm using Gephi software)[32] identified five clusters (“groupings”), which can be interpreted as constituting publics of common readers, involving all the people who follow these Facebook pages (and not just the activists of the collectives whom I am “friends” with). In other words, the empirical material analyzed and interpreted simplistically indicated the existence of five distinct digital counter-publics: (1) digital feminism (made up of various Facebook pages and blogs with no physical existence or organized outside virtual reality); (2) peripheral cultural movements; (3) the sacred feminine; (4) institutional feminism (NGOs, traditional social movements, state feminism and international bodies); and, finally, (5) black women and black feminism.[33]
One of the most important clusters for “peripheral feminism” is the latter, of black women, which helps us to understand how and why the issue of race has become central to the activism of these young women (MEDEIROS, 2017, 167-193). However, this discursive matrix is complex and needs to be understood in its nuances. Firstly, it is not only possible to understand it from a theoretical-conceptual perspective (pages such as Blogueiras Negras, Sueli Carneiro and Lélia Gonzalez), but also necessary to explore the contribution of an aesthetic-expressive perspective, so to speak: all the pages dedicated to black women’s beauty, as a means of combating the intersection between racism and sexism, by valuing their identity, their aesthetics and their self-esteem. Secondly, even in terms of theoretical strands, there is no necessary unity: different frameworks coexist within “peripheral feminism,” namely black feminism (the term intersectional feminism is often used as a synonym) and African womanism (MEDEIROS, 2017, 149 and 190-193).
The reception and appropriation of feminist theories has therefore ceased to take place through mediating agencies and has started to be carried out autonomously by peripheral militants and activists in an “individualized” (CASTELLS, 2013, 172) and very fragmented way: it is not even possible to say that the appropriation of feminisms takes place in a homogeneous way within each collective, each Facebook timeline is unique.
Final considerations: structural changes in counterpublics
In my research, I detected discontinuities between the historical moments of women’s associations in the East Zone by considering what can be called a societal dimension—that is, socializing experiences, forms of sociability, and discursive matrices—as subaltern counter-publics. In this conclusion, I would like to name five of these discontinuities as structural changes in the counter-publics of this territory:
[i] The CDCMs (created between 2002–13) institutionalized the practice inaugurated in the 1990s by “popular feminism,” of providing psychological and legal assistance to women facing violence as part of their coming into contact with social assistance. The organizations that were pioneers in this type of care found themselves increasingly constrained into adopting these kinds of agreements, as they entered into a prolonged crisis of sustainability. Practically at the same time the Eastern Network for Confronting Violence was consolidated, with its partner houses starting to serve women. Alvarez (2014a) called this process of institutionalization in which feminist activists began to manage public services “vertical flows” (from civil society towards political society). The author also uses another useful concept to interpret this situation: “transformative paradox,” whereby the institutionalization of a feminist movement practice into municipal public social assistance policy—by structurally altering the political-institutional environment of women’s associationism in the East Zone—paradoxically opened up space for less institutionalized practices, such as the artistic-cultural practices of peripheral feminist collectives. With the emergence of a network of services devoted to the issue, the care of women facing violence no longer needed to be the exclusive charge of women’s organizations. Equally contributing to the drive to institutionalize grassroots feminist associations (their transformation from counter-publics to strong publics, in Fraser’s sense), was the sharp restriction of their external funding (international Christian NGOs such as the Dutch ICCO and Samuel Foundation and the German Misereor stopped prioritizing projects in Brazil after the Lula government) as well as some internal institutional changes (such as the enactment of the Maria da Penha Law and the creation of the São Paulo State Public Defender’s Office, both in 2006).
[ii] The feminist NGOs in the center-west region of São Paulo moved away from grassroots work in the East Zone and stopped providing technical advice for “popular feminism.” Emblematic is the departure of SOF from São Miguel Paulista, around 1996–97, when it left its headquarters to focus its work on the South Zone of São Paulo. This fact is recalled in some interviews as having profound consequences, as I was also able to witness as an interviewer at one of the Deliberative Plenaries promoted by the Municipal Secretariat for Women’s Policies, with the assistance of SOF, at the beginning of 2015. The interviewee exalted the possibility of resuming the work of the 1980s and 90s at that time, suggesting that with the departure of SOF “we couldn’t hold ourselves together” and that “there are too few women for too much activity”; her greatest wish was “for women to get together again like before.” SOF had done a lot of work with women in the region, but when it “went only to the South Zone, our work collapsed.” The theoretical mediation on gender and feminism provided by this external organizational network was replaced by immediate access (in the sense of no longer being mediated by those NGOs or other institutions) to feminist discourses, theories and debates provided by social media platforms. Processes underlying this phenomenon have been called the “digitalization of public spheres” (CELIKATES, 2015) and “mass self-communication” (CASTELLS, 2015): a technological revolution in the material basis of forms of communication. This has enabled the production, circulation and reception of discourses in a horizontal, extremely decentralized and potentially transnational way, fostering a “creative audience” and a “culture of autonomy,” in which formation and information—in the case of my research, of feminist discourses—occurs in an immediate (without mediators), heterogeneous, and singular way. The second structural change was, therefore, the replacement of that articulating network of feminist NGOs with headquarters outside the East Zone by digital counterpublics.
[iii] If in “popular feminism” the Workers’ Party was an “articulating node” (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 27-28), “peripheral feminism” is made up of collectives (horizontal self-organizations), non-partisan by nature. The PT’s rootedness in the daily life of the urban peripheries was guaranteed by grassroots work, facilitated by certain urban popular organizations and movements. Even though the peripheral feminist collectives and their members may eventually benefit from public policies coming from PT governments (such as the VAI Program at the municipal level and ProUni at the federal level), the PT did not provide them with spaces of sociability in the same way it did “popular feminism.” All those interviewed by the popular feminist associations had been part of the party at some point in their activist careers. In the mid-1990s, the party’s priority shifted from building “from the bottom up,” and from social movements and grassroots, to concentrating more on contesting the presidential election; this strategy, combined with the departure of grassroots leaders to work in offices, resulted in a process that many authors have described as a “bureaucratization” of the party.[34] Some of those interviewed, although they remain members of the PT, show some disappointment with the party’s direction; even though they publicly defend it and the government of then-president Dilma Rousseff (including on social media). Privately, with microphones on or not, they share their unhappiness and their difficulty in being electoral cables in their regions of operation, due to either the federal government (of then-president Dilma Rousseff) or the municipal government (the administration of then-mayor Fernando Haddad). In any case, the most important thing to note is the absence of grassroots work on the part of the PT, which has had direct consequences for the activities of the associations, organizations, and movements that have gravitated around it since the 1980s, structurally altering the possibilities for the popular classes to enter the public arena through the party system.
[iv] The CEBs were practically annulled as a subaltern counterpublics rooted in the daily life of the urban peripheries, through two processes. Firstly, we have to consider the profound and time-consuming effects of the Vatican’s intervention in the Catholic Church in São Paulo from 1989, with the break-up of the Archdiocese of São Paulo and the creation of the Diocese of São Miguel Paulista, replacing Dom Angélico Sândalo Bernardino, a progressive religious and assistant to Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, with a conservative bishop. The change at the top of the hierarchy in the eastern region has had consequences right down to local and microscopic daily life, with changes of priests in parishes, alterations to the liturgy that reinstate the distance between clergy and laity, not to mention the obstacles raised to initiatives previously considered normal and even desirable (such the use of parish halls for meetings, whether by popular movements or women’s groups in the name of more directly religious activities), and even direct and unscrupulous persecution of certain members of the community involved in political activities. This conservative political intervention, with consequences for the political, spiritual and daily experiences of popular feminists, was combined with a second broad (and irreversible) process of diversification of the local, metropolitan and national religious field, and this religious pluralization was even more intense in the East Zone than in other regions of the city, especially in terms of the growth of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches. This has further eroded the foundations that once greatly facilitated both a dialog between leaders and the grassroots within “popular feminism” through Liberation Theology—and also allowed the ecclesial space to be much more than that, as a space for meeting, leisure and a network of sociability—in the form of the CEBs (MACEDO, 1986). Thus, religiosity ceased to be a structuring space of sociability in the genesis of women’s association, and ceased to be one of its discursive matrices. I would stress, however, that it is wrong to assume that certain religious experiences are intrinsically blocking collective actions in favor of women’s rights, as I was able to attest from the evangelical background of several of the young women interviewed.
[v] The last structural change I want to point out is the densification of black counter-publics in the 2010s. Both discursive matrices of “peripheral feminism” (the artistic-literary counter-public of peripheral culture and the digital counter-public around black feminism and African feminism, not to mention all the pages, websites, blogs and YouTube channels dedicated to the aesthetics and beauty of black women) can be conceptualized as black public spheres, while in the case of “popular feminism,” only its third and minority discursive matrix (the samba schools and Afro blocks) could be understood in this way. The centrality of the racial issue for young activists from the peripheries of the East Zone (not only in the case of black peripheral women, but also white women) can be interpreted as the result of the emergence and densification of these new black counter-publics, which made it possible for an anti-racist oppositional code to circulate much more intensely in this second historical moment than in the first. If black feminism was already present and active in “popular feminism,” but in a minority way, in “peripheral feminism” it moves from the margin to the center, constituting its majority discursive reference.
[1] On the impact on data collection of the limits and potentialities of my social situation (white middle-class male researcher) in interaction with the positionalities of my interlocutors (peripheral women, most of them black), see the Introduction to my thesis (MEDEIROS, 2017, 23–37) and its modified and expanded version in an article (MEDEIROS, 2019).
[2] Six associations were interviewed: Associação de Mulheres da Zona Leste (Amzol); Casa da Mulher Lilith; Coletivo de Mulheres de São Mateus; Espaço Lilás do Oriashé; Grupo Cultural Dandara; and Movimento de Mulheres de São Miguel.
[3] Six of the seven CDCMs in the East Zone were interviewed: Casa Anastácia; Casa Cidinha Kopcak; Casa Zizi; Maria da Penha; MulherAção; and Naná Serafim (only Casa Viviane dos Santos is missing).
[4] Seven collectives were interviewed: Fayola Odara; Juntas na Luta; M.A.N.A. Crew; Mulheres de Orí; Mulheriu Clã; Semente Crioula; and Ser Vi Elas.
[5] Despite these criticisms, the author maintains that the feminist field was already “plural and heterogeneous” in the 1970s and 80s. There were “alliances and coalitions” between “middle-class women” and other women who were poor, black or lesbian, just as black women’s organizations emerged at the end of the 1970s, autonomous from both the white feminist movement and the mixed black movement (ALVAREZ, 2014a, 24).
[6] As the author’s diagnosis predates the end of the so-called “pink wave” in Latin America, the political, institutional and legal setbacks in the field of gender and sexuality could not be incorporated into her analysis at that time. For the conceptual and empirical purposes of this article, this is not detrimental, considering that my own field research ended in 2016, when there were already signs of setbacks (MEDEIROS, 2017, 222–223), but before the election and inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro as president of the republic. For an attempt to extend Alvarez’s theoretical framework in this context of setbacks and the shift from offensive to defensive feminist struggles, see Mederios & Fanti (2019).
[7] “[We realized that the] paradoxes we identified were experienced as tensions, bringing [the] personal and [the] collective history into the present, and these acute discomforts [pushed] the women to act. [Paradoxes gave movement] to the movements themselves, pushing them to realize the future while [moving] through time” (RUBIN; SOKOLOFF-RUBIN, cited in ALVAREZ, 2014b, 73, n. 16; translation altered and supplemented by me with the additions highlighted by brackets).
[8] “Another important contribution to thinking about the category of political field was made by Doimo (1995) and by Sonia Alvarez and Evelina Dagnino (1995), who used the expression ‘ethical-political field’, the latter relating Sader’s discursive matrices to Nancy Fraser’s idea of counterpublics (alternative public spaces), as well as to the notion of ‘ethical-political principle’, used by Sérgio Baierle (1995), with Gramscian inspiration. The authors state that ‘the discourses and practices of social movements had [by then] demarcated a common field of reference and difference for collective action and collective contestation’, delimiting a new ‘ethical-political field’ in society. It was in this field, legitimized by making undeniable injustices explicit, that the social movements supported their struggles” (FELTRAN, 2005, 213).
[9] The use of the French translation of The Structural Change of the Public Sphere (entitled L’espace public) leads Sader to frequently refer to “public space” instead of “sphere.” Authors who continued their research agenda on social movements (at least until the early 2000s), such as Telles and Feltran, always use the concept of “public space,” but their privileged interlocutor is Arendt and not Habermas. I believe it is important to emphasize the Habermasian inspiration of Sader’s research in order to bring it up to date in a useful way.
[10] Fraser formulated the category by combining the terms “subaltern” and “counterpublic,” respectively coined by literary theorists Gayatri Spivak and Rita Felski.
[11] The so-called vertical flows, towards NGOs, the state and international organizations.
[12] Hall never explained the social conditions for the possibility of oppositional codes. My hypothesis on this issue equates the “interpretive communities” to which the author referred on another occasion (HALL, 2003, 378–381) with counterpublics.
[13] Amzol, Lilith, Saint Michael, Oriashé and Dandara.
[14] São Mateus and Fala Negão (a mixed association; its founder, the interviewee’s mother, is deceased).
[15] Amzol brought together communities and mothers’ clubs from parishes in Itaim Paulista and the surrounding region; Casa da Mulher Lilith used to be a women’s group that met at Nossa Senhora do Carmo Parish in Vila Alpina (in Vila Prudente); the São Miguel Women’s Movement was created within the East Zone Health Movement (MSZL) which, in turn, arose in the Santa Luzia Parish in Jardim Nordeste (in Artur Alvim); and, finally, the São Mateus Women’s Collective used the São Mateus Apóstolo Parish (in São Mateus) to hold some of its meetings.
[16] As well as writing the entire thesis in the first person singular (repeating the “we” preached in academia seemed to me to be an invitation to reproduce and naturalize the white man as the universal subject of knowledge, while the “I” marks me as such, avoiding ideological falsifications), I also always highlighted my interlocutors’ speeches in bold.
[17] Angélico Sândalo Bernardino was auxiliary bishop of São Miguel from 1975–89, organizing pastoral ministries, parishes and communities along the lines advocated by Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, archbishop of São Paulo, in the progressive line of the Second Vatican Council (IFFLY, 2010).
[18] NGOs such as: Sempreviva Feminist Organization, Rede Mulher de Educação, União de Mulheres do Município de São Paulo, Coletivo Feminista Sexualidade e Saúde, Geledés, Católicas pelo Direito de Decidir and Fala Preta! Some empirical research carried out on these “central” NGOs can help us understand the technical advisory role they played for grassroots feminist associations: in the case of SOF and RME (GOMIDE, 2002) and in the case of UMSP (OLIVEIRA, J., 2013). For a comprehensive understanding of the history of the feminist movement in the city of São Paulo, see Fanti (2016).
[19] As the then president of the East Zone Women’s Association explained to me: “Amzol has no theoretical part. We are more practical, but the theoretical part came from Catholics for the Right to Decide, a lot from SOF and the Women’s Education Network”; another interviewee, from the São Miguel Women’s Movement, formulates the relationship with feminist technical advice as follows: “Who taught us to shout was SOF.”
[20] The Jêje Mahin nation in the case of Oriashé’s founder and the Ketu nation in the case of Dandara’s interviewee.
[21] Hanchard points out a supposed Latin American singularity in relation to the racial question in the United States or the Caribbean: “the rhetorical collapse of racial difference under the banner of national identity” (HANCHARD, 1994, 181). According to the author, the absence of forms of racial segregation common in the United States or South Africa make the question “what is Afro-Brazilian culture?” more complex in the case of our country. Historically, “Brazilian national culture has always translated and transformed Afro-Brazilian cultural practices as national cultural practices, thus making them commodities in popular culture to be consumed by all” (HANCHARD, 1994, 182). This cultural operation came into question with the emergence of the contemporary black Brazilian movement in the mid-1970s, and the spaces of sociability that constituted its genesis, such as the Black Soul dances and the Afro blocos (such as Olodum and Illê Aiyê), “which produce lyrics and music that use Afro-Brazilian identity and racial discrimination as their main theme” (HANCHARD, 1994, 181). Claiming cultural practices that had previously been “de-racialized” as “national culture,” these initiatives were essential for creating an alternative public sphere, in other words, a black counterpublic, which made it possible to use “racial identity as a principle for organizing collective action” (HANCHARD, 1994,182).
[22] Correia points out in his empirical study covering Amzol how “the racial issue is inserted timidly” and how “the racial debate was not yet prioritized” (CORREIA, 2015,48). In this sense, it is possible to attribute to Oriashé and Dandara the anticipation of certain characteristics of the next historical moment, as I will argue below.
[23] In 2014, SMADS accounted for 1,190 services. Only 6.3% are direct services provided by São Paulo City Hall (all 49 CRAS—Social Assistance Reference Centres; the 24 CREAS—Specialized Social Assistance Reference Centres; and the 2 POP Centres—Specialized Reference Centres for the Homeless). The other 93.7% of SMADS services are agreements with 1,575 different organizations (among them: the CCAs-Centres for Children and Adolescents; the CJs-Centres for Youth; the SASFs-Serviços de Assistência Social à Família; the NCIs-Núcleos de Convivência do Idoso; as well as other modalities) (MEDEIROS, 2017, 55). It is in the context of partnership between municipal social assistance and civil society organizations that we should begin to understand the CDCMs, although this does not completely exhaust or determine their work (SANTOS, C., 2015).
[24] In 2015, the city of São Paulo had 13 of these centers: the majority were located in the East Zone, but they were also present in other regions (3 in the South Zone, 2 in the North Zone and 1 in the Central Region).
[25] Between 2003 and the beginning of 2005, a third service, Espaço Lilás in Cidade Tiradentes, operated under the auspices of Oriashé. Unlike the other two initiatives, which also came from civil society, Oriashé—the only one to work specifically on the issue of black women—did not receive support from the PT city government to become institutionalized, in the form of an agreement to fund its activities and a contract to ensure its permanence in the premises it was given.
[26] The Rede Leste is also made up of direct public facilities or other government bodies that are not within the scope of my investigation into women’s associations because they have no relationship with civil society (as is the case with the affiliated houses). In addition to the 7 CDCMs, the Bem Querer Mulher Agents and the PLPs from the São Mateus Hospital, the following participated in the Rede Leste in 2015: the Itaquera Women’s Citizenship Center (CCM) (then linked to the SMPM—Municipal Secretariat for Women’s Policies); the Helenira Rezende de Souza Nazareth Shelter, known as “Casa Helenira” (also linked to the SMPM); the “Maria Auxiliadora Lara Barcellos” Sexual and Reproductive Health Care Centre, in Cidade Tiradentes, known as “Casa Ser” or “Casa Ser Dorinha” (linked to the SMS—Municipal Health Department); and the Specialized Centre for the Promotion and Defence of Women’s Rights of the São Paulo State Public Defender’s Office (NUDEM/DPESP).
[27] Center for Social Assistance and Vocational Training.
[28] The proposed ethnography of the state ends up overemphasizing a vertical, “top-down” perspective, erasing the prehistory of the Rede Leste. The author writes: “Until the early 2000s, there were no services (governmental or otherwise) specialized in assisting women in situations of violence in the East Zone of São Paulo” (SANTOS, C., 2015,592). My interviews provide evidence contrary to this claim: as I said in the previous section of this article, back in the 1990s, Amzol (through the Maria Miguel Legal Centre, in partnership with PGE-SP) and the Lilith Women’s House ran pioneering services that anticipated the work that would later be carried out in a more formal and institutionalized way by the CDCMs and Rede Leste. The coordinator of Casa Cidinha (and former member of the São Mateus Women’s Collective) revealed in an interview, for example, that the practice of Casa da Mulher Lilith in the 1990s inspired the founding of a partner service in 2002. The agency of the women activists of “popular feminism” is also diminished when their theoretical-methodological approach, more focused on the state, privileges institutionalized actors: both in the case of Casa Cidinha and Casa Viviane, the author’s narrative attributes centrality to the NGOs that maintain the contracted services (Associação Padre Moreira and AVIB), to the detriment of the “popular feminism” organizations (Coletivo de Mulheres de São Mateus and the Abra os Olhos Companheira Movement). The interviews I conducted and the documents and research I consulted, show that the two Catholic NGOs did not “create” the houses (SANTOS, C., 2015,593 and 594) since they both had much less agency in demanding and institutionalizing services—these being much more formal instruments requested by government so that feminist activists, with their informal organizations (a “collective” and a “movement”), could achieve their goals. A societal approach is therefore able to grasp these complex historical processes, such as the connection between “popular feminism” and the Rede Leste, in a denser way than a state-centric perspective; CDCMs are better understood not as a public service detached from the deep history of the feminist field, but as a type of feminist organization analytically constructed in comparison with “popular feminism” associations and “peripheral feminism” collectives, in their connections, flows, tensions and paradoxes. Finally, I would also like to highlight the erroneous conclusions about the Maria da Penha and Naná Serafim CDCMs, which, as the author herself explains, did not allow her access to their organizations, and did not grant her any interviews (SANTOS, C., 2015, 595); my own interviews with their coordinators entirely contradict the thesis raised by the author, about a supposed “familist” approach on the part of these two affiliated houses, and it is much more appropriate to talk about the adoption of a “gender” perspective. In the specific case of the Maria da Penha CDCM, its coordinator in 2015 was a member of the PCdoB, a member of the Brazilian Women’s Union (UBM) and a feminist.
[29] On the Maria da Penha Law Campaign’s focus on criminal law “as an instrument for conflict resolution and social change,” in addition to viewing its repertoire as a “powerful normative and instrumental resource for giving public visibility to the issue” of violence against women, see Maciel (2011, 97 and 106).
[30] The leap from two to seven services in the East Zone between 2012–13 happened at almost the same time as Casa Lilith gave up its property in 2011 due to lack of money, and Amzol was evicted in 2012 from its headquarters in a Cohab in Vila Mara. Without their headquarters, these two paradigmatic organizations of “popular feminism” found it very difficult to continue operating. While Casa Lilith closed its activities, Amzol applied in 2015 for a contract to manage the Women’s Reference Center (CRM) in São Miguel. While in 2016 this agreement momentarily saved Amzol from its sustainability crisis, one of the first acts of the new mayor, João Dória (PSDB), was to abruptly terminate this contract at the beginning of 2017.
[31] According to Castells himself, with the development of Web 2.0, a new form of communication emerged, which he calls mass self-communication, characterized by three elements: (1) it reaches a potentially global audience; (2) it is multimodal because digitalization allows for the reformatting of various contents into different forms; and (3) it brings together “self-generated content, self-directed emission and self-selected reception by many who communicate with many” (CASTELLS, 2015, 118). Vertical communication practices are not annulled, but both complementarity to and in conflict with horizontal networks. As subjects become both senders and receivers of messages, the internet strengthens “practices of autonomy” (CASTELLS, 2015, 183). Messages are interpreted in a largely dynamic process, with the production of meaning being interactive, constituting a “creative audience” (CASTELLS, 2015, 184).
[32] I would like to thank Márcio Moretto Ribeiro for his technical assistance, without which this analysis would not have been possible. The procedure is explained in more detail in section 3.2.2 of my thesis (MEDEIROS, 2017, 136–137).
[33] You can find the relationship between the five groupings and how each grouping is structured into various sub-groupings—in other words: publics and sub-publics—in Medeiros (2017, 138–146).
[34] Secco (2011), for example, analyzes the history of the PT, showing how in its early days it acted as a “social opposition” (extra-parliamentary), but in the 1990s it began to act as a “parliamentary opposition,” until, after Lula’s election in 2002, it became a “party of government.” For another analysis of the PT’s electoral strategy and its growing acceptance of the logic of the Brazilian political system, see Nobre (2013).