Between Refusal and Affirmation: Theorising Emancipatory Political Imaginaries Through Black Women's Representative Practice in Brazil

A central challenge for radical democratic theory is how to make normative claims about representative practices without undermining democracy's fundamentally open-ended, agonistic character. This article addresses this tension by developing a framework of affirmative refusals—political practices that simultaneously refuse exclusionary arrangements while affirming alternative democratic possibilities. Drawing on Political Discourse Theory and Black feminist thought, I argue that emancipatory politics can be recognised through what it refuses and what it affirms, without resorting to prescriptive criteria. The analysis focuses on Black women legislators in Rio de Janeiro's Legislative Assembly (ALERJ), whose practices demonstrate how strategic occupation of representative spaces can contest exclusionary norms while prefiguring alternative democratic arrangements. Through ethnographic research, including legislative speeches, interviews, and observational data (2019-2022), I identify two performative modes through which Black women enact affirmative refusals: acts of reaffirmation and acts of normalisation. These practices generate emancipatory democratic imaginaries that simultaneously expose institutional exclusions and rehearse transformative alternatives. The framework contributes to debates on representative institutions and radical change by showing how intersectional struggles illuminate the inseparability of universal democratic principles and particular political struggles, positioning historically marginalised actors as theorists of democracy whose practices constitute sites where democratic theory is actively made.