Despite legal advances including gender quotas and mandatory funding for women's political participation, women of color remain profoundly underrepresented in Brazilian institutional politics. More troublingly, we are witnessing active backlash: the delegitimization of gender and racial justice as political projects, the dismantling of institutional equity commitments, and targeted harassment of Black feminist actors.
This paper examines how Brazilian Black feminist movements and political organizations navigate contemporary backlash, analyzing three dimensions: (1) the weaponization of legal mandates through "orange candidacies" and co-opted equity language; (2) institutional silencing, where women of color parliamentarians receive diminished speaking time, fundings and policy influence despite symbolic presence; and (3) Black feminist counter-strategies that reconstruct political possibility by centering care, racial justice, and climate action as non-negotiable state priorities.
Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies and decolonial theory, we argue that genuine democratization cannot emerge from legal reforms alone. Instead, it requires black feminist movements that resist co-optation of equity language and center decolonial knowledge systems in reimagining state priorities. Using case studies of feminist organizations operating through territorial methodologies, we demonstrate how Black feminist actors—pushed to institutional margins—develop alternative epistemologies and build transnational coalitions that fundamentally contest hegemonic definitions of power.
The paper contributes by theorizing from the Global South and activist praxis rather than external observation, grounding analysis in how backlash specifically operates against Black and anti-racist feminist movements in Latin America. Centering Lélia Gonzalez's "Améfrica Ladina" framework, we foreground how African diaspora knowledge and Black feminist praxis reshape political landscapes under conditions of backlash. We explore alternative temporalities and conceptions of political success that emerge when movements operate from spaces of marginality, offering crucial insights for understanding and resisting anti-racist feminist backlash across geographic and political boundaries.
