Between Amefricanidade and Transfeminism: Legacies and Discontinuities of Black Feminist Thought in Contemporary Brazilian Politics

This paper examines how contemporary transgender feminist politics in Brazil both inherit and unsettle the legacies of Black feminism. Building on Lélia Gonzalez’s “Amefricanidade,” which centers Afro-diasporic knowledge and quotidian racialized sexism (Gonzalez, 1988), Sueli Carneiro’s call to “enegrecer o feminismo,” foregrounding epistemic racism and the politics of voice (Carneiro, 2003), and Beatriz Nascimento’s reworking of quilombo as a living grammar of Black autonomy (Nascimento, 1989), I argue that transfeminist organizing rearticulates these traditions under new regimes of bodily regulation, security, and political representation. Drawing on intersectionality as adapted to Brazilian realities (Akotirene, 2019), I analyze how trans and travesti movements have transformed the repertoire of Black feminist struggle from community self-defense to claims on institutional politics, exemplified by recent electoral breakthroughs, media and policy advocacy. Engaging scholarship on trans citizenship and embodiment (Bento, 2006) and theorizations of transfeminism as a critique of the sex/gender order and racial capitalism (Gomes de Jesus, 2014), the paper traces continuities—collective care, territoriality, and an ethics of insurgent knowledge—alongside discontinuities: the centrality of gender self-determination, the juridical contestation of pathologization, and the emergence of visibility politics that can both expand and constrain coalition-building. Empirically, I mobilize national civil-society dossiers on anti-trans violence and political participation (Benevides & Nogueira/ANTRA, 2023), activist writings (Moira, 2016), and social media content from trans politicians and prominent figures to show how transfeminist agendas negotiate the persistent racialized vulnerability of Black travestis and trans women while demanding a redistributed horizon of rights, e.g., the right to safety. The contribution reframes Brazilian Black feminism as a living archive that is being reinterpreted through transfeminist praxis, now inaugurating distinctive claims on recognition, representation, and reparative justice.