Mulheres que fazem políticas públicas para mulheres : ativismo institucional feminista no governo federal (2003 a 2016)

Abstract

Recent studies in Brazil indicate that, since the country’s re-democratization, significant transformations have occurred in the patterns of interaction between society and the state. This process is evident both in the action strategies of social movements — which began operating within the state bureaucracy, aiming to influence public policies through political parties, participatory institutions, institutional activism, among other channels — and in changes to state dynamics, with the opening of participatory channels and the reformulation of public policy implementation processes. In the first decade of the 21st century, this movement intensified, and the creation, in 2003, of the Special Secretariat for Policies for Women of the Presidency of the Republic (SPM-PR), the first federal government body dedicated to public policies for women with ministerial status, can be understood as an arena of such interaction. The objective of this dissertation is to deepen the analysis of state-society interactions and to investigate the effects of feminist institutional activism on the institutionalization of public policies for women and gender. From a historical and temporal perspective, the research focuses on the actions of women within the SPM during the administrations of the Workers’ Party (PT), between 2003 and 2016. It is argued that feminist institutional activism produced substantive effects both on the development of public policies and on the trajectories of the activists themselves, characterized by a process of institutional learning, in which the state and feminist movements engaged in a dynamic exchange of knowledge and practices