Decentering a Mulher popular ? Gender-Class and Race in Early and Contemporary Latin American Popular Feminisms

Two Definitions of “Popular Feminism”

Contemporary popular feminisms did not emerge in a vacuum. They have deep roots in earlier periods of mobilization among women from the popular sectors in the region since the 1970s. I believe that reflecting on this lineage can help us understand their limited attention to racism. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s throughout most of Latin America, people in marginalized urban and rural communities, squeezed by dictatorial regimes’ austere economic policies and political repression, organized to deal with the difficulties they faced. Observers came to realize that the majority of participants in these popular movements were in fact women (Alvarez, 1990; Safa, 1990). What was then called the movimiento de mujeres (women’s movement) referred broadly to organized women working on issues affecting their families and communities that might or might not be gender-related. Such issues included sanitation and housing, food insecurity, public health, the cost of living, political repression, and disappearances but also day care and later on women’s health, among others.

A common definition of “popular feminism” that I have used in the past is almost synonymous with “women’s movement” (Lebon, 2014), but it recognizes sexist oppression while “women’s movement” does not necessarily do so. This definition reflected my understanding of 1990s women’s organizations on the materially marginalized outskirts of São Paulo that worked to improve living conditions for their communities, recognized the gendered dimension of their work, and slowly claimed the feminist label (see also Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, 2005). In this first and broader sense, popular feminism is thus an analytical category used primarily by observers and not necessarily by participants to designate a “gender-class politics of women of the popular sectors” (see Conway and Masson and Beaulieu Bastien in this issue).

The fact that key members of these earlier São Paulo community-based women’s groups are now active participants in the Brazilian chapter of the World March of Women prompted my interest in examining the connections between contemporary and earlier forms of popular feminism. By the mid-1990s some of these activists and organizations promoted agendas that included not only survival struggles but an explicit recognition of sexist oppression, and they identified themselves as feminists. They were therefore more explicitly feminist than many groups included in the women’s movement. I refer to these locally organized working-class activists as “grassroots” or “community-based” activists in these pages, and by “working-class” I mean that they are materially marginalized, with little prospect of socioeconomic mobility and political voice.

Some of the organized women I interacted with then would also identify with a narrower definition of “popular feminism,” one that restricts it to the organization of “feminist-identified women who articulate a class-based critique of gender/sexism,” whose emergence dates back in fact as early as the late 1980s (Alvarez, 1990: 230). Indeed, in 1990s São Paulo, many organized feminists from the popular sectors and the leaders among them shared a strong class-based critique of socioeconomic policies and inequities and of sexism and were sympathizers or militants of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT). The PT was born, in the 1970s, out of popular and union movements in São Paulo’s industrial belt. In terms of membership, this definition also provides room for participants who are not members of the working class but rather their middle-class “allies.” In this second sense, popular feminism is a political project. It is a label used by politicized participants themselves to designate their “cross-class and cross-movement political project of [socialist-feminist] mass-movement building” (Masson and Beaulieu Bastien in this issue).

This narrower definition also engages with the political connotation of the word “popular” in that it refers to a contemporary political vision on the left. This vision builds on a Gramscian emphasis on organizing efforts rooted in the everyday realities of the popular sectors rather than those led by a vanguard (for an elaboration on this conceptualization, see Conway in this issue). This narrower definition fits the contemporary Brazilian March like a glove.

It is difficult to cleanly isolate the two meanings of popular feminism from one another, as Masson and Beaulieu Bastien thoughtfully argue in this issue. As women from the popular sectors organized, their consciousness of the gendered nature of their class interests grew and helped generate a more politicized brand of activist with an explicitly feminist consciousness (one who also often had ties with historical feminist organizations). These organizers in turn helped strengthen popular women’s local organizing with a gender-class framework but also sought to connect them to a political project of socialist-feminist mass movement.

Although early popular feminism is not the only strand of feminist activism present in the lineage of the Brazilian March, it is certainly a crucial component. In fact, March organizers such as Alessandra Ceregatti, a former member of the international secretariat of the World March in São Paulo, tie its origins to the 1980s movements: “[The trajectory of the March in Brazil] is related to the transformation of the women’s movement in Brazil in the 1980s, as popular sectors got involved and the vision of a broad segment of the movement gained ground that sought to connect gender and class (or patriarchy and capitalism)” (personal communication, June 18, 2014).

Elements of what has been referred to as the third wave of feminism in North America (both in terms of generational shift and framing of issues) have also played a part in the growth of the Brazilian March in the new millennium. In particular, we note a strong influx of young women, some coming to the March through participation in the World Social Forum and others through the increasing ranks of working-class youths entering Brazilian universities. In both cases, young women’s interest in applying a gendered lens to the world around them, notably to environmental and political economic issues, has dovetailed with the March’s concerns. According to the March observer Carmen Díaz Alba, many were attracted to the anticapitalist discourse of the March.

The Move Toward Cross-Class Membership and Multiscale Coalitions

While the central focus of popular feminisms—the gendered class interests and needs of women from the popular sectors—has remained similar since the 1970s, contemporary instantiations include participants with a wider range of class positions. I wish here to problematize the concept of “working-class,” since it glosses over much diversity. Who is working-class or middle-class? For example, how should we categorize those who were born in a materially marginalized family but, through education, achieved financial stability, socioeconomic mobility, and political voice? What of those whose families granted them access to higher education and potentially greater political voice but were materially marginalized in adulthood?

Groups considered popular feminist (using the broadest definition of the term) in the 1980s and 1990s were largely composed of organized women with little formal education from materially marginalized urban and rural communities. Few were formally employed; many more were involved in the informal sector to supplement the family income (Corcoran-Nantes, 1990). These groups included neighborhood associations and locally organized autonomous women’s groups, as well as women’s caucuses in mixed-gender urban popular movements and rural workers’ movements. In the 1980s this profile stood in rather stark contrast with the more “middle-class” composition of self-identified feminist groups and NGOs, generally founded by formally educated professional women, a number of which served as support groups for these “working-class” community groups.

Organized popular neighborhood women still constitute one of four pillars of the membership of the contemporary Brazilian March. Its other three pillars are union women, university students, and women working in social services and NGOs, a number of which are connected to the PT. Union women have become a particularly important category for the March today, comprising up to a quarter of all registered member entities: the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Union Central—CUT) and the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (National Confederation of Agriccultural Workers—CONTAG) offer the largest contingents and provide much visibility to the March (Lebon, 2014: 161). These women/organizations also have more support/organizational resources for participation; some are paid or have their transport and accommodation paid. In the 1980s–1990s women also organized in unions, both rural and urban, but they were often overlooked or deemed lacking in autonomy from their union leaders in scholarly narratives about women’s movements (Phillips and Bolles, 2006).

Also affiliated with the March now are local- and national-level feminist membership and support organizations with a more heterogeneous membership in terms of class position. One example is the nationally known autonomous ¹ membership volunteer organization the União de Mulheres de São Paulo. Class diversity is also present in political party organizations, principally the Secretarias de Mulheres of the PT, which are also well-represented. Young women, especially university students, have been involved in large numbers through the March’s batucada feminista (feminist drum section) and its flyer-posting actions. March organizers have long been clear in their intent to involve young women, and their efforts at connecting with university students in various states have paid off. Notably, many of these students have come from working-class backgrounds as access to university education has increased in the past two decades.

The São Paulo-based NGO Sempreviva Organização Feminista (SOF), an organization with long-standing ties to organized popular women, deserves special attention as an example of popular feminism as a political project providing a class critique of sexism. Over time its role has shifted from support group for organized women in unions and popular movements to key organizer of the Brazilian March, its members sitting on the coordinating bodies and ultimately hosting its international secretariat for seven years (2006–2013). Its deep roots in the promotion of feminism and women’s self-organization in unions and popular movements have, I believe, facilitated the maintenance of the SOF’s commitment to movement building around the class-inflected gender concerns of popular-sector women; hence its brand of popular feminism as a political project as opposed to a more institutionalized project. This political project found resonance with that of the PT and, in particular, the left democratic-popular project known as Democracia Socialista, to which some members of the SOF belong.

A New Challenge: Representation Across Difference in Coordination at Higher Levels

The cross-class membership and multiscale character of contemporary forms of popular feminism such as the March have generated challenges in terms of representation across class difference in coordinating bodies that earlier instantiations of popular feminism did not face. The latter were generally local organizations with citywide connections and limited forays only for some, such as the day care movement, at the national level (Alvarez, 1990). In contrast, the March is a multiscale, translocal coalition rooted in locally grounded organizations and working up through state-level and federal-level coordinating committees that interact with the international secretariat.

This setup thus raises the question of how present the various constituencies of the March are in its national coordinating body and its executive committee and how well-represented their interests and needs are. Numerically, the community-based women’s groups described earlier are not the biggest of the four pillars of the March base; union women are. They are more numerous than “middle-class” progressives from NGOs and social service agencies, but they constitute a minority (albeit sizable) of the national coordinating body, which brings together, once or twice a year, 35–50 delegates chosen by state chapters: The April 2014 meeting of this body included 6 leaders of community-based groups out of 34 participants. Many more participants had experience and/or formal expertise in public services or support organizations/NGOs and access to higher education. This body was thus diverse in terms of higher-educational attainment, used here as a proxy for class. ² The CUT and the CONTAG each had one representative, who was also involved in the organization and facilitation of the meeting, and at least three state delegates were connected to unions, providing union women with good representation (although not proportional to their numerical presence among the March’s base participants).

Community-based groups are not significantly present in the March’s executive committee, a group of 6–10 people who meet on an as-needed basis (about three times a year) for agility in decision making. In contrast, union women are present, and a broad range of delegates from popular movement coalitions, left-wing political parties, and a student union, among others, have participated over the years. Unsurprisingly, those organizations, whose initial articulation led to the establishment of the March in Brazil (the SOF, the Centro Feminista 8 de Março, the CUT, and the CONTAG) participated in almost every meeting of the executive committee over the years (Gomide, 2016: 80).

Manuel Castells (2011: 566–567, cited in Gomide, 2016: 29) reminds us that those who are able to connect others are the ones with power in networks. March organizers understand this principle and, recognizing the need to ensure some geographical diversity beyond São Paulo state, have sought to promote inclusion and representation in the executive committee by including a representative from the Minas Gerais chapter. In addition, this particular delegate belongs not to the PT but to another political party, helping, I was told, with the March’s efforts at projecting some level of political diversity. Another key category for the March, that of rural women, has been very well represented. Organizers have also repeatedly expressed their desire to add a youth sector (Renata Moreno, interview, April 2014), and this is reflected in the presence of two young women on the 2014 executive committee. In contrast, representation of Afro-Brazilian women’s organizations has been limited to one organization (Casa da Mulher Trabalhadora) and absent since 2008. At least until 2014, no attention seems to have been given to representation of LGBT/Queer women’s organizations, indigenous women, Japanese/Korean-Brazilian women, or religious minorities. Isabelle Giraud’s (2015: 101–104) work on the demarginalization of various sectors within the World March reveals a similar effort to ensure the presence of youth in movement decision-making bodies through a politics of representation (politique de présence). She notes the absence of any similar effort to ensure the presence of racialized groups in decision-making bodies and the broader lack of attention to antiracism and anticolonialism in the World March until 2010. Instead she notes a slow movement toward demarginalization of racialized and migrant women through discursive politics (politique d’idées) within the World March (2015: 98–99, 112).

Popular-sector women are clearly the focus of the work of translocal popular feminist networks such as the March. Yet these networks face a pattern not unlike that of other cross-class coalitions in which those with more formalized human capital and greater resources in terms of money, time, and freedom to step away from their family/community duties are called upon effectively to represent less privileged members of the coalition beyond the local level. This pattern has been identified by Giraud and Dufour (2010: 130–134) for the March at the transnational level, at least in their European meetings. More research is needed to assess with which interpretation the interests, concerns, and priorities of local groups from the popular sectors, especially those anchored in neighborhoods, make their way onto the agendas of such cross-class, multiscale, and multisectoral popular feminist coalitions as the Brazilian March. One could argue that the presence of union women in coordinating bodies is likely to bolster community-based women’s class interests but not necessarily all of their priorities. Given the focus of contemporary popular feminist coalitions’ collective identity on working-class and marginalized women’s interests, the interests of community-based popular feminist groups are putatively central to the March. Yet because these women themselves are present only to some extent in coordinating bodies at higher levels, their concerns are likely to be partially mediated by allied members of the coalition. Scholars have started highlighting the potential pitfalls of this “ventriloquist”-like dynamics (Conway, 2018).

A Mulher Popular: Gender-Class at The Heart of Popular Feminist Collective Identity

The collective identity of early popular feminist initiatives and that of contemporary instantiations such as the March connect in two important ways—their focus on issues at the intersection of class and gender and their strong unitary collective identity around the concept of “woman,” both eliding race. This identitarian orientation is possibly more salient in contemporary more explicitly feminist popular feminisms than in earlier instantiations. It is worth considering who this “woman”—this unitary mulher popular (popular woman), heteronormative and seemingly beyond racialized difference—is imagined to be. While the gender division of labor and valorization of women’s (paid and reproductive) labor constitute the heart of the contemporary March’s analysis of gender oppression, its discourse also reveals a reappropriation of a feminine aesthetic that resonates with women from the popular classes and is reminiscent of “difference feminism,” a feminism that underscores the differences between men and women (Bojar, 1998: 46). I will elaborate here first on how gender and class are framed in mainstream popular feminisms in their own terms before turning to the reasons for their elision of racialized difference.

While anticapitalist politics figures prominently in the March’s agenda, a strong pull of woman-to-woman solidarity is always present in its work (Giraud and Dufour, 2010: 18). Identity politics in that sense is key to the March and is communicated in a variety of symbols and political practices. The logo of the March is a woman symbol with woman-identified characters within it. The color purple and the “feminine” aesthetics of its banners, notably the use of flower motifs, were already strongly present in 1990s popular feminist movements in São Paulo (Lebon, 1998). The March’s slogans rarely fail to refer to women (e.g., Somos mulheres e não mercadoria [We Are Women, Not Merchandise]). Their practices also reappropriate to great effect traditionally feminine skills such as quilting, as in the 2005 collective construction of the Solidarity Quilt. Women’s craft fairs both valorize underappreciated traditionally feminine skills and enhance the solidarity economy.

This strong unitary identitarian orientation has proven a powerful mobilizing tool among women from the popular sectors. The contemporary March’s aesthetic and discourse and its focus on femininity as embodied by women from the popular sectors resonates with them, in contrast to the more androgynous and “sophisticated” feminine presentations associated with upper-middle- and upper-class women (Elsa Beaulieu Bastien, personal communication, August 16, 2018) and possibly with what they see as “elite feminism.” At the same time, the March has sought to push the envelope of traditional femininity in two ways: First, flower motifs on banners and dresses are enhanced by the theatrical and festive flair of brightly colored oversized wigs and hats made of recycled material such as plastic cups. Second, in its work with the drum section, the March has opened up the traditionally male world of (Afro-Brazilian) drumming to women. This is a very successful and distinctive practice of the Brazilian March, which, at least in São Paulo, where many of those who participate attend the university or are young and formally educated, offers a distinctly more androgynous gender presentation. However, this is not always the case, certainly not in rural areas, where rural women maintain their more conventional rural feminine self-presentation (Elsa Beaulieu Bastien, personal communication). Unsurprisingly, the age and urban/rural diversity of participants and individual sensibilities have given voice to different registers of gender presentation, not to mention deeper differences in gender identity and expression beyond the gender binary. Going beyond symbols and representations, the March’s most powerfully identitarian political practice is that all its decision-making bodies are explicitly women-only. To my knowledge, only cisgendered women have participated in these bodies so far.

This strong identitarian “woman” focus and by-and-large heteronormative discourse and aesthetic may inadvertently chill the appeal of the March for trans women and gender-nonconforming identities (as well as nonnormative sexualities). More research is needed on this issue and on changes that may have occurred since then, but at the 2013 international meeting of the March in São Paulo disagreement surfaced about the nature of trans identity, with a small group of younger participants validating trans women’s experiences. The majority dismissed the inclusion of trans women as U.S. radical separatist feminists have since the 1970s on the grounds that they have not been socialized as women and have not experienced sexist oppression prior to transition. It is worth noting that trans inclusion issues have been present in the larger Brazilian feminist movement at least since the Tenth Encounter of Latin American and Caribbean Feminists in 2005. That meeting, designated in the organizing committee’s call-for-participation e-mail as a “space for dialogue . . . for the Region’s various lineages of feminist thinking,” was rocked by conflict over the inclusion of trans women (Lopez Cruz, 2005).

A hallmark of many forms of popular feminisms since the 1980s has been their focus on collective rights issues and survival issues that connect women’s specific concerns with those that affect “everyone” (really meaning generic women and men) in the popular classes (Citeli, 1994). This key emphasis on a gender-class dual-systems framework has overshadowed the importance of race and other vectors of oppression and privilege for and among popular-sector women. The dual-systems approach “was an attempt to merge feminist analyses of patriarchy and Marxist analyses of class to create a more complex socialist feminist theory of women’s oppression” (Naples and Gurr, 2013: 25). The Brazilian March is continuing this legacy of working at the intersection of class and gender, in particular through the issues it chooses to focus on—among them the minimum wage, not generally tackled by mainstream feminist organizations but particularly affecting women in that they are overrepresented among those who have to survive on the minimum wage. The March has also (re)framed long-standing issues on the feminist agenda such as sex work and abortion rights by highlighting economic justice issues such as the lack of job alternatives, mega construction projects, ³ and lack of access to health services and contraception that undergird them (Lebon, 2016: 176–177).

The collective identity of the March was forged from the start at the intersection of class and gender both internationally (in Quebec, in resistance to the North American Free Trade Agreement) and then in Brazil, starting from the lived experiences of organized popular women. It has also been influenced by the dual-systems approach of the feminist movements that the March sprang from, notably the Quebec and French materialist and Latin American socialist feminisms (Conway, 2017). In Brazil, March organizers believe that, thanks to the coalition’s deep roots in urban and rural popular movements and unions, the coalition has been able to derive these class-inflected gender claims organically from the daily struggles of organized popular women, arising from their collective interaction in the movement. Alessandra Ceregatti says that “this connection emerged from the daily dialectic practice of the March as we organize actions which question the capitalist-patriarchal-racist order, reflect on them, and produce new syntheses and new actions” (personal communication, June 18, 2014). Indeed, starting from the collective understanding of participating women’s social reality is key to the methodology of the Brazilian March, inspired by popular education as well as feminist consciousness-raising practices.

As the quote above illustrates, counterhegemonic structural critiques of the capitalist system and of sexist oppression are central to the contemporary March. Some initial steps toward a critique of structural racism (and heteronormativity) have recently been taken. The March claims an anticapitalist identity, and its slogans and written material generally refer to this identity systematically. In contrast, most early instantiations of popular feminism—as gender-class politics—focused on practical problems related to class inequalities but did not necessarily connect them to a structural critique of the capitalist system. For some, this aspect of their collective identity developed over time and in connection with their bonds to mixed movements with an anticapitalist frame such as urban and rural popular movement networks and unions. In the new millennium, the contemporary March scaled up these alliances with translocal mixed-gender movements such as the Via Campesina and others in the alter-globalization space of the World Social Forum. Alliances with rural women from the Via Campesina and other organizations markedly inflected the March’s agenda toward an ecofeminist and food-sovereignty critique of neoliberal capitalism (Conway, 2018). It is worth wondering how developing similar primary alliances with the antiracist ⁴ or LGBT/Queer movements now active in Brazil would have shaped that agenda.

The contemporary Brazilian March also consistently claims its feminist identity in its printed material and in its slogans and songs, while 1980s popular feminisms often did not and in some cases even rejected such an identity (Garcia Castro, 1992; Lebon, 1998). Most had a fraught relationship with hegemonic forms of feminism in the region. This highlights the fact that the very term “popular feminism” for designating a gender-class politics was often imposed by analysts. Such analysts have argued, I believe rightly, that such women’s activism was just as feminist as middle-class women’s struggles for gender equity even though their focus was not explicitly on sexist oppression but guided by their gendered class position. However, one of the March’s mobilizing strengths has been that it has not required participants to share, much less declare, an explicit feminist identity. Feminist consciousness is assumed to develop with time through participation (Díaz Alba, 2017), making consciousness-raising/feminist popular education an important component of the March’s work.

The Gender-Class Framework of Feminist Popular Education

Popular education was associated with popular feminism in the 1980s and in different ways still is today: 1980s popular feminists in the broader sense did not conceptualize popular education as central to their movements, while contemporary self-identified popular feminists do. Early popular feminists focused on self-organization and mobilization to obtain resources. In most cases, they were involved in popular education initiatives focused on literacy through their Christian base communities or provided by self-identified feminist groups and other left organizations. These early popular education efforts, just like their contemporary manifestations, have been anchored in a gender-class framework.

Feminist organizing around popular education has a long history in São Paulo and in Latin America. Some organizations, such as the 30-plus-year-old Rede Mulher de Educação, have been singularly organized around this principle. However, popular education is a signature practice for the March and a key tool of its primary objective of building a mass movement for change. The importance of popular education for the March is highlighted in its own words; its “method of action is organizing, starting from women of the base, in a broad process of mobilization and popular education” (Marcha Mundial das Mulheres, 2008: 8). When I asked Miriam Nobre, a member of the SOF who was then executive coordinator of the international World March of Women, what had facilitated the Brazilian chapter’s success, her answer was unequivocal: “feminist popular education.”

Recent renewed interest in popular education has played a crucial role in “reinventing the left in Latin America” as it has moved toward participatory democracy and in what has been called the “pedagogical turn” of Latin American social movements (Motta, 2013: 59). I would argue that popular feminist movements have been among the “incubators” of this process (see Carrillo Torres, 2013: 1). The revival of popular education by Paulo Freire in the 1970s was strong in São Paulo’s popular movements, where the SOF first developed its work with organized women in popular health movements. SOF members, along with many other feminists, many of whom were active in leftist parties, were exceptionally well positioned to blend the lessons of feminist consciousness-raising efforts with a socialist feminist analysis of social relations and the vision and tools of popular education initiatives, originally focused on class inequalities (Carrillo Torres, 2007). We note here again the prevalence of a dual-systems approach and its gender-class framework. Many middle-class feminist organizations used this approach in their work with community-based women in the 1970s and 1980s. They called it formação feminista (feminist training). In her dissertation on this issue, Denise Carreira concludes that “the feminist movement elaborated a training methodology based on valorizing personal experience, subjectivity, listening, and emotions, revealing their political character” (2001, quoted in Silva, 2009: 10).

Although by the 1990s, after the return to formal democracy, popular education activities, along with consciousness-raising activities and movement-building activities more generally, had to compete with advocacy work and public-policy-oriented activities and media work among feminist NGOs, the SOF’s work with feminist popular education endured but shifted to national-level endeavors. Ultimately, according to Miriam Nobre, it inspired the March’s work. The March’s version of feminist training focuses on self-organization with attention to in-group power dynamics, albeit imperfectly, and personal empowerment through collective action. It is noteworthy that it frequently refers to this as “feminist popular education” with a “feminist methodology” rather than as feminist training. This appeal to the popular strengthens the identity of the March, distinguishing it from “elite feminism,” and resonates with popular-sector women.

Two key legacies of popular education principles to the March’s “feminist methodology” have contributed to its success in attracting and retaining large numbers of women from the popular sectors. First, activities start from and are built around participating women’s experiences (Faria, 2013: 23). Second, means of expression deliberately include not only the spoken word but also the plastic arts, the theater arts, and body expression in order to facilitate participation by those with less formal education and to develop skills and creativity (25–26). In addition, in line with feminist theory and psychodrama, activities acknowledge participants’ emotions rather than simply trying to impart knowledge and facilitate learning and self-expression through the body (rather than just the mind). The characteristics and purpose of the March’s feminist popular education map well onto Sara Motta’s (2013: 12) analysis of emancipatory social movement pedagogies:

The pedagogies of movements across the region expand the practice of emancipation to include the subjective, embodied and affective; they develop decolonizing pedagogies of everyday life in which popular education is combined with feminist and postcolonial traditions and they transform not only the content but also the process through which we create the conditions for the emergence of new emancipatory subjects and sustainable alternatives.

This short account of the roots of feminist popular education reveals its gender-class emphasis, bringing together the focus on class inequality of the original popular education framework and the focus on sexist oppression of feminist consciousness raising. Questions then arise about the challenges for feminist popular education in unearthing other intersecting social power relations such as those based on racial or sexual hierarchies. As did feminist consciousness raising before it, the feminist popular education approach, with its strong participatory principles, has the potential to reveal and unravel any relations of power. However, feminist popular education as described here has been premised on assumptions of commonality (around gender and class) rather than difference among participants. A popular education process more premised on a politics of difference may offer other possibilities. Differences obscured by national ideologies such as race in Brazil are particularly challenging. The selection and role of facilitators in such settings and the way they influence group dynamics therefore require some attention. Given unequal access to skills and resources related to class, race, and other hierarchies, more privileged organizers whose occupation provides time and flexibility are likely to be tapped to serve as facilitators. Popular feminist networks thus face challenges in ensuring that obscured differences among popular women are not brushed aside. As popular feminist networks such as the March work toward building a political infrastructure to give voice to those who do not have one, in part through their popular education initiatives, their work is complicated by the fact that “processes of political construction are no less power-laden for being collective and dialogical, but their power relations are more subtle and complex, and consequently difficult to see, analyze and assess” (Conway, 2018: 6).

A Challenging Race-Blind Legacy?

The focus of early popular feminisms on the intersection of gender and class may have hampered the development of an antiracist agenda in the contemporary March. As Janet Conway notes in this issue, the notion of the popular has often masked and whitewashed a diversity of positionalities and power relations. In Brazil, one salient case in point is that of race, given the country’s majority Afro-descendant population. The erasure of nonnormative sexual and gender identities in early popular feminisms, sealed by an affinity with normative femininity and motherhood, deserves a similar analysis in a future paper.

Given the overlap of race and class, it is challenging to pinpoint, three decades later, the dynamics at play in the erasure of race in early popular feminist organizing despite the fact that so many of the women involved were of African descent. ⁵ However, just as forms of organizing around women’s concerns that do not explicitly tackle sexism and/or do not identify themselves as feminist should be included in our analyses of feminism, so should forms of organizing by Afro-Brazilian women that are not explicitly antiracist or primarily focused on racial oppression be included in our analysis of antiracist politics. Keisha-Khan Perry (2013; 2016) advocates for and poignantly demonstrates this in her work with contemporary neighborhood organizing against the land grab in Salvador da Bahia.

I argue that a convergence of potent ideologies and material conditions present in the lives of participants, support organizations, and observers/scholars alike militated toward the erasure of race in 1980s popular feminisms, in particular in São Paulo. These ideologies include the myth of racial democracy and the nondichotomous Brazilian racial formation, the secondary status afforded racial inequalities in feminist and Marxist ideologies and in Brazilian liberation theology, and the fact that large black movement organizations in Brazil have not paid much attention to neighborhood-based livelihood and survival struggles despite the superexploitation of the large majority of Afro-Brazilian women (Perry, 2016).

In the 1980s, the myth of racial democracy still resonated broadly in Brazilian national culture (Caldwell, 2017), even if unevenly and contradictorily among people of African descent (Burdick, 1998). It had been institutionalized by the military dictatorship, notably through the complete elimination of the gathering of racially disaggregated data from the 1970 census, leading to almost 20 years without information (Berquó, 2001). It was also strengthened by the Brazilian nondichotomous racial classification system, which, given a Eurocentric culture, encouraged people of African ancestry to “whiten” their identity by using the common intermediate category morena as opposed to preta or negra. It was also strengthened by the “relative lack of clear geographical segregation by color” among the poor (Burdick, 1998: 5). The myth and its emphasis on class as the root of inequality and poverty certainly helped bolster Marxist-influenced activists’ primary focus on class-based inequalities and was closely aligned with the tendency of second-wave feminism and its concept of sisterhood to minimize differences among women. In all these cases, racial oppression and certainly its differential impact on women were pushed aside (Caldwell, 2007; Ribeiro, 1995).

Such Marxist erasure of race likely contributed to a similar trend in Brazilian liberation theology. Political scientists have argued that “Brazilian progressive Catholics have always stressed that socioeconomic conditions will overcome other differences of identity that might separate the poor” (Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, 2005: 135). This matters because initial participation in liberation-theology-inspired Christian base communities was key to the politicization of a majority of women who later got involved in urban popular movements, women who in the 1980s formed popular or grassroots feminist organizations such as the Associação de Mulheres da Zona Leste (Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, 2005). This erasure of race in the progressive Church was not universal, however (see the history of the Agentes de Pastoral Negros in Ribeiro, 2014: 127).

Some observers have also pointed to the Brazilian black movement’s focus on racial consciousness and the politics of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices as contributing to its limited involvement in grassroots movements focused on livelihood struggles (Hanchard, 1994). However, Perry (2013: 22–23) reminds us that while large, formal black movement organizations such as the Movimento Negro Unificado and the União de Negros pela Igualdade may have focused on cultural politics, Afro-Brazilian women have always been involved in neighborhood struggles for survival, many of which include an understanding of their communities as Afro-Brazilian. Perry is careful not to reify the culture/material dichotomy, since “the material aspects of the gendered racism that determines [black women’s] class status [are] intricately tied to representational aspects of gendered racism.” She is eager to broaden our understanding of what constitutes “black culture” beyond its more visible elements. She warns us that “hypervaloriz[ing] Afro-Brazilian cultural practices [such as samba and candomblé] as national cultural symbols” can “end up supporting racist claims of Brazil as a racial paradise.”

Women of African descent have no doubt been active in the urban popular movements on the outskirts of São Paulo, and racial consciousness was alive for at least a substantial segment of organized popular women in the Zona Leste at least by the early 1990s. In São Paulo, the Geledés-Instituto da Mulher Negra was established in 1988, the second such black women’s organization in the country. A survey of participants in the First Feminist Encounter of the Zona Leste, organized in 1992 for and by women from the zone with the support of various feminist organizations (primarily the SOF), reveals that almost half identified themselves as brown or black women (17 mestiças, 26 negras, 54 brancas) (Coordenação de Mulheres da Zona Leste, 1994: 24). Seventy-eight participants were active in a popular or neighborhood movement. The final plenary session of this meeting identified a mulher negra (the black woman) as one of seven key issues discussed and stressed three themes: “valorize identity and culture; fight against and denounce racism; fight against preconceived notions and discrimination” (20). This meeting may have been unusual in that two leading members of the black women’s movement contributed to its organization, including Matilde Ribeiro, who a decade later would take the lead of the Lula government’s Secretaría Especial de Políticas Públicas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial.

The contemporary Brazilian March, while it denounces racism and racial discrimination in the wider society and celebrates black and indigenous women’s presence in the March, has not yet fully integrated a critical race dimension into its analyses and has not tackled racialized power dynamics within the coalition. In fact, its celebratory mood around the cultural and artistic contributions of Afro-Brazilian women may have had the unintended perverse effect of strengthening the myth of racial democracy. Nevertheless, greater attention has been given to antiracism work in recent years: The label “antiracist” increasingly figures alongside “feminist” and “anticapitalist” as the March describes itself in its communiqués and pamphlets. Still, a fully integrated analysis is often missing. The Boletim da Marcha (July-August 2017) flags racism and “lesbophobia” as targets of the March’s work, alongside sexism and neoliberalism, in a number of places throughout the articles and informational items. However, the longer, more analytical piece in this bulletin, a critique of neoliberalism, adopts a dual-systems theory rather than a fully intersectional approach. Signaling a potential change, a theoretically different analysis that is much more intersectional is present in a recent SOF analytical publication, Violência e desigualdade no Brasil (2017). This work reflects a deep analysis connecting racial oppression (and heteronormativity) to socioeconomic exploitation and violence. One caveat here is that racial analysis is limited to quilombo communities (descendants of maroon communities) rather than considering racial diversity among the popular sectors more broadly. While its agenda reflects limited but recently growing attention to antiracist work, the March does not seem to have prioritized representation of black women’s organizations in its decision-making bodies.

Ultimately, these limitations are illustrative of the primacy of dual-systems theory in the March’s framework and the concomitant secondary status of race (and sexuality) in its understanding of the struggles of working-class Brazilian women. They offer a glimpse of what the “popular woman” at the center of the March’s popular feminist coalition is imagined to be, despite the existence of a vibrant black women’s movement in Brazil since the 1980s.

In addition, the American black-sexual-politics scholar Jennifer Nash (2008: 12) reminds us of “the tendency of radical projects to elide critical differences within ostensibly marginalized subject positions.” She shows how difficult it is, even for proponents of intersectionality such as Kimberlé Crenshaw who have focused on “black women” (race and gender) in the United States, to avoid “neglect[ing] the ways in which [black women’s] experiences are also complicated by class, nationality, language, ethnicity, and sexuality” (9). Instead, “black women are treated as a unitary and monolithic entity. That is, differences between black women, including class and sexuality, are obscured in the service of presenting ‘black women’ as a category that opposes both ‘whites’ and ‘black men’” (8–9). Applying Nash’s analysis to popular feminist networks, whose work has been anchored at the intersection of gender and class, helps us understand how they tend to imagine “popular women” as a unitary and monolithic entity. We can adapt Nash’s formulation and see how “differences between popular women, including [race, indigeneity] and sexuality, are obscured in the service of presenting ‘popular women’ as a category that opposes both ‘elites’ and ‘men from the popular sectors.’”

The fear of fragmenting popular women along racial (and other) lines and weakening mobilizing power while multiplying demands mirrors the left’s now well-documented earlier fear of fragmenting workers’ struggles by attending to women’s demands. This fear surfaces in the following internal discussion about how to organize for International Women’s Day, even as it simultaneously recognizes the power of racism and heteronormativity: “We cannot get lost in an unending list of demands but must center anticapitalist feminism, strengthen this day [March 8] as a day of feminist struggle that deeply questions the current model of production and development, which superexploits women’s bodies and lives, is racist, and promotes antigay-and-lesbian bias” (national coordinating committee minutes, December 2013). A fully intersectional framework that brings race/ethnicity, indigeneity, and sexuality to the table, while difficult to develop, would provide powerful analytics for any given political scape (Nash, 2008) and help diagnose potential pitfalls and build stronger bonds of solidarity.

Conclusion

The popular feminist label has been useful for the contemporary Brazilian March in its mobilizing efforts. It distinguishes the March from historical feminism and the latter’s (at times perceived, at times actual) gender-first focus, middle-class bias, and lack of appreciation for the aspects of femininity and women’s culture valued by many popular-sector women. The label “popular” has also provided political strength to the March as it sought alliances with mixed- gender movements on the left (Carmen Díaz Alba, personal communication). This is especially useful in that some sectors on the left still view feminism as a bourgeois and divisive ideology. In fact, the label “popular” has been used on the left for some years as a code word for antisystemic working-class struggles as “revolutionary” struggles have lost their appeal since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The connection of some Brazilian March organizers to the PT and its Democracia Socialista current also made this label particularly relevant. It is important for analytical purposes to identify the forms of popular feminism that are related to the political arena in this way. However, I believe we would be remiss to neglect the legacy of 1980–1990s popular feminisms more broadly construed, as gender-class politics, in our analytical accounts, as often happens with forms of feminism stemming from materially marginalized communities.

Indeed, I have suggested here that contemporary popular feminisms in Latin America such as the March have roots that run deep in the popular feminist movements of the 1980s–1990s. These roots have helped to shape who participates and to produce a focus on the intersection of gender and class and secondary status for hierarchies of race and sexual identity. However, while these earlier forms of popular feminisms (as gender-class politics) were local, at most regional, organizing efforts by materially marginalized women, contemporary forms such as the March scaled up as translocal cross-class coalitions, with a key focus on structural critique, movement building, and consciousness raising through popular education. Such cross-class and multiscale forms of popular feminism bring forth new challenges for representation of the interests of materially marginalized communities, which are likely to be mediated through other members of such coalitions. The March’s strong emphasis on local autonomy, possibly strengthened by the legacy of early popular feminist initiatives, seems key to avoiding the pitfalls of potential ventriloquism and to providing the “infrastructure for agency” for materially marginalized women identified by Conway (2018: 5).

This strong gender-class legacy bolstered the race-blindness also inherited from early forms of popular feminisms and from the notion of the “popular” in the Latin American context. Early popular feminisms were as race-blind as the hegemonic society and political projects from which they emerged, but Latin American racial identity formations have changed substantially since the 1970s. In Brazil, the myth of racial democracy has given way to official acknowledgments of the need for antiracist public policy under the PT administrations. ⁶ Contemporary forms of popular feminism, anchored in their activist, political, and theoretical forebears, still need to fully integrate a critical race perspective into their analytical frameworks. As far as the March is concerned, recent developments bode well, since current moves toward a discursive politics of racial inclusion mark the first steps on the arduous journey of bringing together class, race/indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in productive ways.