Institutionalised resistance against gender-equitable policies: identifying agenda gatekeepers in the Brazilian legislature

How are anti-feminist attitudes manifested in political bodies? In which ways are institutions structurally gendered, preventing gender-equitable policies from being discussed and voted on? This paper aims to provide answers to these questions by presenting an in-depth case study analysis of the Brazilian policy process, showing how its institutional design might favour anti-feminist actions in the agenda-setting stage of the policy process and providing examples of how this resistance is manifested. Departing from feminist institutionalist analyses that seek to unveil the micro-foundations of how institutions are gendered, this paper provides a fresh insight into how a focus on policy processes and policy outcomes could be mobilised to comprehend anti-feminist actions inside political institutions. The Brazilian legislature seems to be the ideal setting for feminist institutionalist case analyses focusing on unveiling the nature of resistance against gender-equitable policies: despite having a thriving environment with hundreds of feminist bills proposed, the country’s sequential examination process with multiple individual gatekeepers allows for unilateral decision-making that limits the possibility of gender-equitable policies being further discussed, analysed, voted, and possibly approved. Still, despite its focus on a single country, this paper aims to provide new ways of empirically studying anti-feminism, resistance, and backlash within political bodies, thus contributing to the broader literatures on the opposition to gender-equitable change, feminist institutionalism, as well as gender mainstreaming.