Popular Feminism in the Favelas: Reflecting on Women’s Experience with Police Violence

• In Event: Violencia de Estado, Justicia y Género

Abstract

This article aims to examine the construction of feminism in the context of women living in the slums (favelas) of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Reflecting on their experience with police violence, I attempt to show that these women have developed a particular mode of resistance based on their position in intersecting oppressions of gender, race, class, and spatiality. First, women develop resistance in the day-to-day struggle for survival, in what Scott (1990) called the ‘hidden transcript’, where their actions are protected from dominant gaze. Second, they openly resist police violence in the public transcript, which, I suggest, they usually access through what I call the ‘gender breach’. I argue that urban violence gives specific insights into the process through which women’s political consciousness is constructed. Building on the scientific literature on women and social movements in Latin America, which mostly argues against division between women’s movements and feminism, I show that these women create a specific form of feminism in context of police violence, which can be associated with what some have called “popular feminism”.

To achieve this goal, methodology adopted is qualitative and methods or inquiry were based on eight interviews, three focus groups and participant observations made with over forty women in 2016 and 2018. Women were mostly asked to talk about their life in the favelas (open-ended biographical interviews) and especially about police violence. Inductive analysis of their testimonies showed the gradual construction of a specific political consciousness and struggle as Black women from the slums.

Author

• Anne-Marie Veillette, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS)