When Gender Equality Machineries Open the Doors to the State: Do LBGTIQ+ Actors Enter Them Easily?

When ‘gender-friendly’ governments create a gender equality machinery (GEM) and endow it with institutional power and resources to pursue gender-egalitarian public policies and gender mainstreaming, they open a door to the state for social groups with overlooked gender-centric grievances. The fundamental question then becomes: Which under-represented social actors are able to gain entry into the policy arenas on which the GEM acts? Using an institutional feminist analysis, this paper focuses on a Global South case, Brazil, which is notorious for its high level of deadly violence against LGBTIQ+ people. The country’s GEM liaised with LGBTIQ+ self-identified women actors and became an institutional advocate for their healthcare demands, which policy initiatives successfully contemplated. Yet, the GEM shied away from engaging in two of their vital grievances: the legalization of same-sex unions and the introduction of non-homophobic education in public schools. Important political actors - especially politicians tied to the Pentecostal Evangelicals, as well as (to a lesser extent) the military, and the Catholic Church - mobilized to defeat those demands. The main takeaways of this case are, first, that GEMs espousing politically contentious or hot-button issues (Mazur and McBride, 2007), must be prepared for the emergence of adversarial policy communities. Second, GEM’s proximity to a ‘gender-friendly’ head of government can be a double-edged sword. They face difficulty engaging in doctrinal battles (Htun and Weldon, 2018), especially in political contexts where their participation in those fights can weaken their ‘gender-friendly’ ally.