Transnational Network Ecologies and Feminist Mobilization against "Mass Sterilization" in Brazil

• In Event: 4366 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Revolution and Social Change

Abstract

Since the Brazilian feminist movement’s resurgence in the mid-1970s, in the context of military rule, activists made condemnation of “mass sterilization” a central priority, part of a larger repudiation of a global project of population control. This article traces the history of this mobilization through the passage of the country’s Family Planning Law in 1996, focusing on the local embeddedness of transnational networks. In doing so, it seeks to expand understandings of transnationalism by introducing the concept of “network ecologies.” Feminist scholars have called attention to how transnational networks circulate resources, ideas, knowledge, policy innovations and strategies, in ways that can create solidarities but that are also selective, uneven and fraught with potentials for misrecognition and mistranslation. Much of this literature has focused on transnational feminist networks themselves. The concept of "network ecologies" sheds light on dynamics among multiple stakeholders engaged in these debate and their transnational articulations. By underscoring the coevolution of transnationally networked actors engaged in national debates, whether in coalitional or oppositional relation to each other, it calls attention to how these interrelationships shape the selection, (re)interpretation and embedded salience of particular transnational discourses and practices and illuminates the polyvalent ways such discourses and practices intercede in local contexts. Concretely, Brazilian feminists entered a public sphere that was already thoroughly globalized. Against the backdrop of Cold War geopolitics and a gradual process of formal democratization, condemnation of mass sterilization united a surprising array of transnationally networked actors, including feminists, Afro-Brazilian activists, Marxist revolutionaries, healthcare reformers, critical demographers and progressive Catholics, producing a coalition that, while responding to local imperative and constraints, also reflected and reinforced selective articulations with counterhegemonic transnational networks across these constituencies. The article draws on extensive archival research and over 100 interviews with feminists and other stakeholders in Brazil.

Author

• Rafael de la Dehesa, College of Staten Island, City University of New York