Though the entire legal machinery was mobilized to justify it, the impeachment of Brazil’s first female president was an authoritarian act. On one side: the President, Dilma Rousseff, a woman seen by a significant section of the population as of the left. On the other: a man, white, understood by many as embodying the right, and an organic member of the dominant social class. In the aftermath of Dilma’s overthrow, the balance of forces in Brazil has been tilted in favour of the most conservative sections of the ruling class. This implies significant social changes in the sphere of state power and the public imagination, at a time when inequalities are widening, and the withdrawal of rights, the spread of discrimination and the criminalization of dispossessed young people and women—above all poor black women—is on the rise. The democratic process that opened up from 1985, with the end of the military dictatorship, is now being suffocated, initiating a new crisis that poses deep challenges for the left.

This essay sets out to analyse the social conditions of Brazilian women in the context of this conjuncture, bearing in mind, first, the wide variation in women’s positions in a city like Rio—in their cultural outlooks and worldviews, their daily lives and political activity, their socially grounded situations. Second, black women from the favelas face inequalities that distinguish them from women of other social strata—the middle class, and those who don’t work for a living. In this sense, beyond analysing the position of women in general, my central concern here is to identify that of women who suffer not only from the institutional machismo of Brazilian society, but also the impact of the structural racism that is hegemonic here. Third, I want to draw attention to the women working in the poorest and most precarious conditions. This goes for the majority of women in the favelas and other marginalized urban districts, who nevertheless remain a powerful force for creativity and inventiveness, with the capacity to overcome their circumstances through their daily struggles and forms of local organizing. It is through these multiple activities that women have taken on a central role in cities like Rio de Janeiro.

There are some conditions that are specific to the lives of women from the favelas, which should be taken into account in any consideration of the varying levels of social, economic and cultural inequality. Neighbourhoods lack government resources or infrastructure, with poor public transport, making it hard to access the areas where the major educational, work and cultural centres are concentrated, which in turn has an impact on the time that can be spent in study, leisure and family life. Second, class distinctions also operate in the favelas, even though all are workers; precarious labour conditions and contracts exert a range of different pressures. Exposure to lethal violence is a common condition, as is the experience of discrimination and stigma. Finally, it’s worth noting again the creativity of these women, motivated by the need to surmount their objective circumstances and claim alternative spaces for artistic, educational and political activity, as well as varied forms of subsistence work. Developing an analysis based on this complex objective situation, while also taking into account the subjective factors entailed in the ideological arguments, narratives and institutionalized power of dominant discourses, is a crucial exercise for understanding and intervention in the current conjuncture.

After this brief outline of the category ‘favelada woman’, we need to substantiate how these women live, feel and act on a daily basis, confronted with the effects of the recent right-wing ‘coup’. The emergency of life has always been a vivid reality for these women. They have always lived the consequences of the state’s crackdown on rights and the imposition of policies aiming at interdiction and domination. Periods of ‘social well-being’ in Brazilian history have been hard-won achievements, rather than concessions granted by those in power. Although institutional machismo has been one of the bases of Brazil’s social formation, black favelada women also encounter other forms of domination. But the present political situation, characterized by the hardening of state power and the pre-eminence of an authoritarian-conservative white male, intensifies this dynamic.

While the lived experience of these inequalities, running throughout Brazilian history, has a greater impact on the peripheries and the favelas, these women are not defined by impoverished passivity—contrary to their representations in mainstream discourse and the media. They have taken on central roles in the fight for state policies that challenge inequality and expand the human dimensions of civil rights. In this way, they have succeeded in making changes at a neighbourhood level that make powerful claims as new sites for the popular imagination and for social relations. In their engagement in everything from the arts to social and political practice in the marginalized districts, the presence of these women resonates through the city. It is worth emphasising that the peripheries and the favelas are part of the city—not separate from it. What distinguishes them from the other districts is the way the residents in these communities organize themselves, beyond the low public investment in their lives.

The life trajectories of these women—particularly black and mixed-race women, who make up the majority—are driven by an instinct for survival, for themselves and their families. They build networks of solidarity focused on sustaining lives and reinforcing dignity. While they bear the brunt of Brazil’s unequal social formation, they are also the ones who produce the means for transforming it, expanding mobility in every dimension. In this sense, they will be most sharply penalized in the current context, while at the same time they are centrally positioned to resist. The term ‘survival’ here goes beyond the maintenance of life—even in the face of the growing wave of femicides in Brazil (in 2015, two-thirds of the victims were black). Survival also involves housing conditions, food, health, clothing, schools, working lives, means of transport, access to culture; it goes beyond any purely economic definition to include the multiple dimensions of life. Today, these bodies in the peripheries are the principal site of exploitation and control imposed by the capitalist order—replacing the ‘industrial body’. In this context, black women from the peripheries, especially the favelas, can be key instantiations for democratic advance, co-existence with difference and overcoming inequality.

Although the cultural activism and political militancy of these women is initially related to local issues, and intimately linked to the objective and subjective conditions of their lives, the local advances they have won have an impact throughout the city. In this sense, there are numerous outstanding favelada women, whose actions and representations transcend the environment that predominates over their lives. This is not a matter of individuals being particularly enlightened or special, but a question of trajectories, encounters, perceptions of self and other, opportunities, and engagement with social issues. In a positive sense, this phenomenon, already on the rise before the right-wing takeover, poses the challenge to the left of how to sustain its momentum as a way of overcoming the conservative wave now sweeping across Brazil.