Women Leading the Backlash: Female Actors and the Affective Politics of Anti-Feminism in Brazil

In contemporary Brazil, a significant number of women express feeling belittled, morally discredited, or rendered invisible by what they perceive as feminist discourse. For some, selective or distorted understandings of feminism foster the belief that feminists look down on women whose identities are anchored in motherhood, religiosity, or domestic and family-centered femininity. For others, particularly after the country’s right-wing turn, disillusionment takes the form of identifying as “ex-feminists,” and their withdrawal is attributed to experiences of digital shaming, accusations of ideological betrayal, or the perception that feminism has been absorbed into a partisan leftist project. These diffuse feelings of disrespect and symbolic injury have become potent entry points through which female right-wing politicians, scholars, and influencers mobilize women into anti-feminist identification. Through emotion narratives and carefully crafted testimonial practices, female leaders such as Ana Campagnolo recast traditional gendered identities as honorable, virtuous, and indispensable to the nation. Personal stories of conflict with feminists, humiliation, and exclusion are circulated to provoke anger and resentment while simultaneously offering comfort, recognition, and renewed pride. In this process, anti-feminist actors convert private grievances into collective meaning, transforming women’s experiences of diminishment into a shared moral project. What emerges is an affective community that gathers women from diverse racial, religious, and class backgrounds under the promise of protection, validation, and a revalorized feminine self. Patriotic motherhood, moral superiority, and divinely or naturally sanctioned femininity become central emotional anchors, including for mothers whose children have historically been marginalized by racial hierarchies. This emotional architecture, rather than ideological coherence, is fundamental to the contemporary Brazilian right’s expanding appeal among women. The paper concludes by examining what these affective dynamics reveal about the reconfiguration of gendered identities in Brazil and by emphasizing how colonial legacies, racial stratification, and religious imaginaries shape the distinctive emotional grammars of anti-feminism in the Global South.