Brazil's Escola Sem Partido as Part of a Widespread Anti-Gender Social Movement in Education

Escola Sem Partido ("School with no Parties") was a Brazilian social movement organization that presented itself as a "politically-neutral" bastion against the "ideological indoctrination" of children by ill-intentioned teachers. Said "indoctrination" supposedly involved the support of the, then in power, center-left Workers' Party (PT), whose 2011 "School with no Homophobia" initiative was characterized by the, then congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, as a "gay kit" meant to convert children into homossexuality. Utilized by Bolsonaro in his 2018 presidential campaign and currently inspiring president Trump's "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling" Executive Order, the narrative of indocrination in schooling by a "radical left" gained widespread attention in Brazil around 2015. Given the self-declared "end" of ESP in 2019, this paper disputes if the movement around it demobilized in the country because its agenda was successful or because it failed. Via semistructured interviews, the paper argues that the perception of success due to the occupation of positions by allied actors in the Executive Branch happened simultaneously to a series of judicial losses and strategic learnings by a widespread conservative movement in education. These strategies consisted, mainly, of discourse against "gender ideology", the defense of homeschooling and the implementation of civic-military schools. This paper also argues that the "victory-defeat" dichotomy does not consider the learning opportunities in defeats and the possibilities of long-term "non-success" in temporary victories. Instead of a generalized demobilization, the paper follows Lapenga, Motta and Paredes' (2023, p. 294) understanding that "demobilization can coexist with mobilization at different scales" to conclude that a possible demobilization in actions related to ESP ocurred at the same time as the activation of the conservative movement's networks in favour of other agendas. The self-declared "end" of a social movement organization doesn't implicate, necessarily, the end of the movement it was a part of, even if said organization held a position of particular importance at a given time. Networks can be reactivated, demands can be reframed, and the shared collective identity does not cease to exist simply because of the withdrawal of some of the movement's activists.