Women’s movements have played an important role in Brazilian democratization.’ Frequently, this role is described as the capacity of these groups to create new institutions within the state, such as the Councils on the Rights of Women and the women’s police stations. On other occasions, it is presented as their great ability to mobilize public support and lobby the Congress or join international networks of women’s associations and influence the framing of both national and international documents in UN-sponsored conferences. The diverse Brazilian women’s movements offer a strategic perspective from which to look at democratic consolidation for two reasons. On one hand, they force us to conceive of democratization as a process that extends well beyond the institutionalized political system. In fact, if women’s movements are contributing to the democratization process, it is not so much because of women’s ability to join institutionalized politics but because of their continuous capacity to create new spaces for articulation and mobilization and to provoke transformations that affect cultural patterns of inequality and authoritarianism embedded in everyday life. On the other hand, however, while they do this, women’s movements face restrictions that indicate the limits and the main challenges of an effective democratization in Brazil. These limits relate to the delegitimation of the justice system and of individual and civil rights, dimensions that traditionally constitute the cornerstone of a feminist agenda. As they act to transform these dimensions, women’s movements contribute to the expansion of civil citizenship in Brazil and simultaneously expose both the discriminations suffered by women and other minorities and the precarious side of the democratization process itself.

To make these claims, I look at the relationship between women’s movements and the process of democratization in Brazil from four interrelated perspectives. First, focusing on the women’s movements, I address their changing organizations and relationship with the state, their capacity to influence public policies and to continuously re-create spaces for political mobilization. Second, I analyze the disjunctive character of Brazilian democracy, that is, the fact that although it has democratized at the level of the political system, Brazilian society continues to be plagued by violence, human rights abuses, and the delegitimation of the justice system, all of which affect the situation of women. Third, I discuss how the women’s movements have been struggling for the legitimation of rights in this disjunctive democracy and therefore expanding the scope of citizenship. Finally, I let the experience of Brazilian women’s movements talk back to feminist theory and democratization theory, and I raise a series of questions about the models that usually frame how we think of women’s rights.