“Bureaucracy without women is half done”

institutional paths of struggle for rights in Brazil after redemocratization

Abstract

Institutional activism, a repertoire of political action characterized by the actions of social movement activists in the state bureaucracy, was adopted by several social movements in Brazil, mainly after the country's redemocratization, as a way of implementing demands. Among these, portions of feminist movements also began to seek ways of fighting for rights beyond traditional instances of representation and the repertoires characteristic of direct action. In this article I highlight important results and moments in the process of institutionalizing “women's” demands in Brazil. To this end, we recovered feminist theorists, especially those who theorized about “State Feminism”, and studies on social movements, to capture an attempt to provide a timeline of the actions of these women and their institutional achievements at different moments in the relationship between State and Social Movements. In this sense, some factors stand out as fundamental to the success of this incursion into the State, namely the political direction of governments, with emphasis on the national sphere, and the access strategies created by women.