Body-Territory and Political Gender-Based Violence in Améfrica Ladina: Lessons from Brazilian Feminist Deputies

This paper has as its main objective to analyse gendered political violence (GPV) from the perspective of body-territory in Améfrica Ladina, taking the Brazilian experience as an empirical starting point. Building on previous work that revisits the typology of GPV in dialogue with the Latin America law model on GPV, I argue that current definitions are still insufficient to grasp how race, gender, class and territory are co-constitutive in the everyday lives of women in politics. Mobilising Black, decolonial and Latin American feminist elaborations on corpos/cuerpos-território, and Lélia Gonzalez’s proposal of Améfrica Ladina, I conceptualise women’s bodies in politics as disputed territories where colonial, racist and patriarchal projects are updated and contested. From this lens, threats, disinformation, institutional obstruction and everyday humiliations are not only attacks on individual trajectories, but also on the communities, memories and political projects that these bodies-territories carry with them into parliament. Methodologically, the paper draws on in-depth interviews with progressive Brazilian federal deputies (2019–2022), many of them part of the first Feminist and Anti-Racist Parliamentary Front. I revisit their narratives of violence during campaigns and in office, paying attention to how they locate aggression in concrete spaces: plenary sessions and party meetings, but also favelas, rural areas, indigenous lands and digital environments. The paper speaks to three interconnected debates in this Section: (1) it contributes to theoretical and epistemological innovations in gender and politics by centring body-territory and Améfrica Ladina as analytical tools; (2) it illuminates the dynamics of promotion and backlash around gender and sexuality rights in a context of democratic backsliding; and (3) it rethinks participation and representation by showing how GPV operates as a territorial technology that decides who can inhabit the State. In dialogue with activists and policymakers, I conclude by suggesting adjustments to existing typologies and legal frameworks so they better reflect situated, intersectional experiences of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.