Femocrats and demands for women’s health policies in post-colonial societies. Evidence from Brazil.

In Brazil, a left-leaning president, Lula da Silva from the Workers’ Party, created in 2003 a gender equality machinery (GEM), known as the Special Secretariat of Public Policies for Women (or SPM). President Lula transformed the SPM’s head into a federal minister with a seat in the cabinet and endowed the agency with substantial institutional power and resources to pursue its gender mainstreaming ambitions and policy agenda. Organized women mobilized and held city, state, and national conferences to communicate its policy priorities to the SPM, which the agency used to devise its National Plans of Public Policies for Women. Soon, a groundswell of pent-up demands emerged, and the GEM embraced most of them. In addition to pan-women policy demands, there was the perceived need to transform the health care system from the inside, providing state responses to issues such as structural racism in its diverse manifestations, especially obstetric violence. In that regard, minority women, particularly Black, Indigenous, and sexual-minority women demanded that specialized, sensitive training be provided to healthcare professionals. However, as women’s groups also demanded an expansion of women’s reproductive rights, the national health policy in its entirety became a bone of contention and part of a highly adversarial policy community. This paper demonstrates that in postcolonial societies with a past of enslavement, GEMs that develop symbiotic relations with gender-centric movement actors end up being called upon to provide redress to a long list of grievances, all stemming from the “coloniality of power” (Quijano and Ennis, 2000: 533). More importantly, a GEM’s initial success in framing a policy debate – for example, health equity – may prompt the formation of non-collaborative policy communities, which can, in turn, thwart additional policy changes that femocrats are intent on pursuing.