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ISSUE NO. 14
“América Latina Vai Ser Toda Feminista”: Visualizing &
Realizing Transnational Feminisms in the Women’s
Worlds March for Rights
Cara K. Snyder
Dr. Ana Maria Veiga
Dr. Cristina Scheibe Wolff
On August 2, 2017, ten thousand feminists from around the globe
took to the streets of Florianopolis, Brazil to march for women’s
rights. The Marcha Mundos de Mulheres por Direitos (Women’s
Worlds March for Rights, or MMMD) was a central part of an
academic conference jointly titled the 13th Women’s Worlds
Congress / 11th Seminário Internacional Fazendo Gênero. Using
this March – both its physical forms and its digital translations –
as a case study, this essay explores how the visual rendering of
dissent articulates and realizes transnational feminist politics
and solidarities.
 
August 2nd, 2017, Florianopolis, Brazil. 5:00 P.M. We are at a conference, jointly titled
the 13th Women’s Worlds Congress / 11th Seminário Internacional Fazendo Gênero. [1]
Written on that day’s schedule: The Women’s Worlds March for Rights. When we
arrived at the meeting point, the sun had begun setting and vibrant purples and pinks
were splashed across the sky. The noise was revving up. The cacophony of drums, each
percussionist rehearsing a beat, joined the hum of cars passing through the busy
intersection and the faint ocean sounds of seagulls and waves hitting the shore.
Activists readied their signs, painted their banners and bodies, and greeted one another
with embraces and kisses. A coalition of indigenous women from throughout the
Americas performed an opening ceremony to bless the land, demand demarcação já
(recognition of their land rights) and pay homage to its ancestors. Then, as part of this
academic conference, 10,000 feminists from all over the world began marching in
protest and in solidarity.
In 2017 in Brazil and in the United States, where the authors of this paper were born,
there is much to protest. Progressive-leaning governments have been replaced by
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nearly all male, all white, conservative administrations, almost exclusively comprised
of representatives over the age of fifty and from societies’ capitalist elite. In these
countries and around the world, politicians increasingly evoke nationalist discourses to
justify sweeping neoliberal reforms. Oppression, though ever present, feels more acute.
It is in this global context of extreme nationalisms that we take a transnational
approach to the aesthetics of dissent, in general, and the visuality of The Women’s
Worlds March for Rights (the Marcha Mundos de Mulheres por Direitos, hereafter
MMMD), in particular. Such an approach, in times of rising and violent nationalisms, is
itself a form of protest. And it seems that women, whose rights and status are
appreciably menaced, are the major protagonists of protests at this moment.
This essay tells the story of a particular demonstration to suggest that visualizing
protest and the feminist aesthetics of dissent facilitate transnational solidarities. In the
case of the MMMD, the protests’ visualizations – disseminated via photos, films, social
media posts, etc. – live on, connecting feminist activists and academics from all over the
world. The first section of the essay provides background information about the
organization of the conference and March as well as the planning of its audiovisual
coverage. The second section discusses the meanings and manifestations of
transnationalism in this context. The last section reflects on the MMMD’s visuality, and
on the process of digitally rendering live protest. Throughout we draw on a digital
archive of photos and video. [2]
The Conference (WWC/FG), the March (MMMD), and the Audiovisual Committee
The Seminário Internacional Fazendo Gênero (International Doing Gender Seminar, or
FG) is an academic meeting, created by a group of women-identified teachers and
researchers who met at the Institute of Gender Studies at the Federal University of
Santa Catarina. It is a congress that began modestly in 1994 with the aim of bringing
together researchers and students who work on gender, women, feminism and
sexuality from interdisciplinary perspectives. Gradually, the biannual meeting has been
growing and gaining (inter)national notoriety; in 2008 about 3,000 people attended. The
FG 10 in 2013 had more than 5,000 registered and the FG 11, that took place from July
30th to August 4th, 2017, had 9,695 registered participants. This last FG was quite
different, especially because it was held in conjunction with the 13o Congresso Mundos
de Mulheres (13th Women’s Worlds Congress, or WWC), which entailed, in addition to
further internationalization, an opening of the event to the feminist, LGBT and women’s
social movements.
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One of the main objectives of the congress was to have a real meeting between
academics and activists, allowing spaces for dialogue, joint activities and a discussion
between knowledges, between issues and policies, between academia and activism. To
achieve this, the first step was to set up a Commission of Social Movements to be part of
the WWC’s Organizing Committee. The committee began meeting in November 2016 to
deliberate on how to carryout activities beyond the traditional spaces of academic
debate such as talks, round tables, mini-courses, presentations, and posters. This in
mind, the Debate Forums were designed to be eminently political, as were the plenary
sessions, workshops, talk wheels and the MMMD. Various movements – workers
unions, black women’s movements, feminist groups, rural women’s movements,
indigenous women – joined in this organization, and together these movements
conceived of and designed the March, the performances of the movements, the themes
to be raised in the tents and conversation wheels, and the places to be visited in the
sightseeing routes.
The MMMD was the culmination of this meeting, bringing together academics, activists
and people from the city of Florianópolis. The students and faculties marched alongside
the women of the Movement of Peasant Women, Indigenous activists, Women of the
Landless Movement, trade unionists, black women’s groups, participants in the slut
walks from various places in Brazil, Ni una a menos from Argentina, from LGBT
movements of sex workers. Organizers proposed four stops, three of which were
carried out: in front of the Santander Bank (Indigenous women, farmers, black and
quilombolas movements); in front of the Cathedral (LGBTQIA+ folks); in front of the
Social Security Office (workers movements and the MMD). [3] The stop in front of the
City Hall, to protest regressive public policy, was not realized.
In terms of audiovisual coverage, the conference organizers’ goals for the WWC/FG
were to emphasize the visibility and consolidation of feminist networks and gender
studies through images, including photographs, reports and film. Thus, the archiving of
audiovisual material began in 2016 with the recording of the organization meetings,
which was made possible by the voluntary labor of producers from Manacá Cine Studio
(under the direction of cinematographer and CEO Márcia Navai). [4] The material
leading up to the conference, collected and edited by Manacá since the end of 2016,
began to feed social networks, along with the graphic material produced by a team of
volunteer students. [5] The producer’s goal, in addition to advertising WWC/FG, was to
put together material for a documentary to show the scale of the event, to highlight the
mobilization of women and the LGBTQ+ population both inside and outside the
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academy, to explore debates within feminist and activist communities, and to call
attention to extant activist networks.
Fourteen individuals, including Márcia Navai, Ana Veiga (the Programming and
Communication Coordinator and co-author of this article), ten students, and four
professionals comprised the committee responsible for audiovisual coverage of the
event. Students were paid for their time, while professionals offered their services
according to their artistic, activist and professional priorities and in exchange for
keeping the rights to their images. Together, this group photographed and filmed
conference activities such as keynotes, round tables, thematic symposiums, discussion
forums, workshops, mini-courses, thematic visits, conversation circles, artistic
presentations and “Tent” programming. [6] In addition to registering these numerous
conference activities, each member of the audiovisual team was an active
documentarian – including film and photography – of what, for many, served as the
highlight of WWC/FG: the MMMD. The following footage gives an overview of the
sounds, scope and substance of the March: Marcha Internacional Mundos de Mulheres
por Direitos e Fazendo Gênero. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=swuHNUZ9z4c&feature=youtu.be)
In this short video, we see women from various parts of Brazil and the world. The
sound of the drums, symbolic of the struggles of women of African descent and
characteristic of the larger Marcha Mundial de Mulheres (World March of Women)
group, accompanied protestors throughout the March. While feminist marches all over
the world share a recognizable percussion, the multi-lingual chants signaled the
presence of a diversity of movements. The repeated cries of Ni Una Menos (in Spanish),
or not one [woman] less, connected this March with the movements to end violence
against women in Argentina and other Latin American Countrie. It also points to
interplay between the digital and the sonic: from #BlackLivesMatter, to #NiUnaMenos,
hashtags are part of the sound geography of live protest. [7] Demarcaçaõ Já (in
Portuguese), or demarcation now, is the call of indigenous women, demanding
indigenous sovereignty over their ancestral lands. The chant from this paper’s title –“Se
cuida, se cuida, se cuida seu machista, América Latina vai ser toda feminista,” or “be
careful, be careful, be careful Mr. misogynist, Latin America is going to be all feminist”
– foregrounds transnational unity in the movement against machismo. Working in
solidarity, marchers from across the globe displaced nationalist discourses, which often
reifies gender roles, relegates women to an idealized stereotype, and diminishes their
contributions (Yuval-Davis & Anthias, 1989; Enloe, 1990; Moghadam, 1994). Rather,
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protestors emphasized shared, subnational (i.e. “Latin America”) and cultural (i.e. “anti-
misogyny”) formations, and they represented a diversity of women. The novelty of the
MMMD is that it transformed an academic conference into a march, and in so doing it
created a transnational space of research, exchange, and protest, affirming women as
protagonists of knowledge production as well as political movements.
Reading Transnational Feminism in the Aesthetics of Dissent
Although the MMMD was called “International,” and indeed it did bring together
women of 33 nationalities, we argue that one of the most remarkable features of the
March was its transnationality. And transnationalism, we argue, is a boon to feminist
activism. To define the term: transnational approaches are materially and historically
situated (Mato, 2005), but they recognize “multidirectional connections between locals”,
and the asymmetrical flows of power between them (Tambe, 2010: 3). Transnational
scholars have made clear that this methodology is not a zooming out, or lack of
accountability for the local. Rather, it is an approach “from below” (Flores, 2009), that
emphasizes subjects’ negotiations and exchanges between nations and states. It is
radically local (Matory, 2005). Feminist approaches to transnational methodologies
provide a critique of and an alternative to the global, which can be essentializing; the
international, which relies on top-down approaches; and the comparative, which can
reify differences and leave the category of nation unchallenged (Tambe, 2010; Seigel,
2005; Briggs, McCormick & Way, 2008). Transnational feminist methodologies trouble
hierarchies of time, space and objects of study (McClintock, 1995). In other words,
transnational feminism contests the ways temporal hierarchies – that place Anglo-
American women as the vanguards of progressive gender politics and that situate other
women as “backwards” in terms of gender relations – are often mapped onto
geographies. Transnational feminists reject this imperialist progress narrative. Anne
McClintock’s (1995) analysis in Imperial Leather of how a commodity such as soap is at
once domestic and imperial, and how rituals of domesticity staged the civilizing
mission, has been an influential model for transnational feminist scholarship. Through
the aesthetics of dissent, we can trace the transnational contours of the MMMD, thereby
insisting on a feminism that pushes against virulent nationalisms and progress
narratives, that accounts for identities and experiences that are shaped in relation to
one another, and that takes seriously the aesthetics of dissent as objects of study.
Another transnational feature of the MMMD is the people and ideas that met there in
protest. The March comprised people of various localities and nationalities. Residents
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of Florianopolis marched side by side with the folks who came to WWC/FG from other
Brazilian states and from other countries, which is one element contributing to the
protest’s transnational character. Many were academic women: teachers and students.
This transnationality can also be thought of in another dimension, in the meeting of
women from distinct indigenous peoples (nations), coming from different parts of
Brazil, mobilized for the meeting. In interviews, some of these women affirmed the
importance of their visibility, realizing that the WWC/FG and the MMMD enabled this.
At the forefront of their agenda, indigenous participants advocated for respect of
indigenous peoples and the demarcation of their lands. [8] Many Mozambican activists,
artists and academics attended the March, in preparation for the upcoming Women’s
Worlds Congress in Maputo in 2020. In some ways, this particular March is similar to
feminist protests (such as the January 21st Women’s Marches) in other parts of the
world, both in terms of the content – sexuality, abortion, racism, disability, violence, and
environmental and reproductive justice – and (to some extent) the form – posters,
chants, banners, music. Thus, its registration and dissemination are significant beyond
a specific case study. But the MMMD also exemplifies several tenants of transnational
feminism that were perhaps missing from protests like the January 21st Women’s
Marches. Calling the MMMD an example of transnational feminisms in action
recognizes the agendas of marchers beyond a pre-determined, Eurocentric model of
what feminist activism can look like (Basu, 1995). For instance, the central space
occupied by rural women seeking agricultural reform and indigenous women fighting
for sovereignty points to flourishing feminist struggles that are not often highlighted in
U.S. women’s marches. Tracking how the MMMD was conceived and visualized is
especially crucial for understanding transnational feminist networks across the
Americas and in the Global South.
The Repertoire and The Archive: Registering Feminist Protest
A protest is an affective and embodied assemblage that is experienced in the moment.
[9] The sensations of a march – singing, moving, sweating, embracing – cannot be
exactly reproduced. What is digitally rendered becomes registry, an archive of sorts
that translates the event into film, image, and text. Performance studies scholar and
transnational Latin Americanist Diana Taylor’s theorizations on the repertoire and the
archive are particularly useful in dissecting MMMD’s off and online engagements.
According to Taylor, the repertoire “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures,
orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as
ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (Taylor, 2003: 19). It requires presence. Even
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if the embodiment changes, however, the meanings may remain the same. An archive,
on the other hand, separates the “knowledge from the knower” (Taylor, 2003: 19). It
consists of material or digital objects that do not necessarily change, although the ways
they are interpreted may. [10] The media below, from an archive of coverage assembled
by the audiovisual committee, suggest which sorts of images are selected, classified, and
presented for analysis. Following this same vein of performance studies scholarship,
reading the March as a performance has political implications. Specifically, because
performance relies on embodied and performed behaviors rather than on literary and
historical documents, it makes space for memories, experience and struggles from
locations which have been silenced, such as the those across the Global South
(Conquergood, 2002). In other words, to read a protest through aesthetic and
performances of dissent is to take nonverbal forms of knowledge seriously. It is a form
of decolonizing scholarship.
In addition to the translation that takes place when a march becomes an archive,
transnational forms of protest also require translation across geographies. We suggest
that performances of dissent and the images that capture these, translate politics in a
way word cannot. Translation between geographies often fails, and especially the
translation of feminist politics between the global North and South (Costa, 2006).
Linguistic translation, as Spivak reminds us, is one word or idea standing in for
another, which dislodges any possibility of literal translation (Spivak, 2012: 242). But
images – and the proverbial 1,000 words contained within them – do not strive for
literal translation. Rather, they aim to reflect a repertoire. Moving away from a text-
centric understanding of translation into the realm of the visual and the experiential
might open up space for translations that are more capacious because they are sensate.
The constitutive elements of feminist protest – song and chant, movement, signs, body
paint, costume – can be more universally understood via visuals, without necessarily
being universalizing.
The MMMD featured many visual and performative elements, which refer to
contemporary transnational feminist movements, and which illuminate aspects of the
March’s liberatory vision. At the foundation of this visual rendering is the belief that we
must envision alternative worlds in order to create them. The process of visualizing (of
rendering visual), then, is a process of world-making that may be more translatable
across borders and languages than solely text is. If we read the archive and the
repertoire from the MMMD as a feminist, anti-racist, queer roadmap of sorts, the vision
points toward indigenous sovereignty, reproductive justice, liberatory queer love, and
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transnational solidarity against all forms of oppression. The following images, from an
archive of coverage collected by members of the audiovisual committee, suggest some
of the March’s transnationalism:
(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/sneider1.png)
[Figure 1] Photo Credit: Márcia Navai
Pictured here (Fig.1) is the batucada (musical group) Cores de Aidê and
marchers donning Women’s World March attire. Dressing in clothes that
represent the particularity of the March (like the pink pussy hats of the
U.S.-based Women’s March) is one aesthetic common to feminist protests.
The Afro-Brazilian drumming bears traces of connections with Africa, and
the songs and chants are accessible only in Portuguese. Still, because a
photo does not transmit sound, its visuality translates to a wide audience.
 
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(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/snyder2.png)
[Figure 2] Photo Credit: Lorelay Andrade
In this image (Fig.2) a protestor marches using a bra as her top. On her
back are the words “leave her in peace”. Such visuals are connected to
tactics used in Slut Walks, a transnational feminist movement against
rape-culture.
The written language combined with the body also makes for easier translation. Brazil
is the only country in the Americas whose official language is Portuguese. While it can
be difficult for Spanish speakers to understand spoken Portuguese, they are more likely
to understand written Portuguese (because the writing bears more similarity than then
pronunciation). An image of the body-writing, then is more translatable across Latin
American feminist circles.
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(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/snyder3.png)
[Figure 3] Photo Credit: Márcia Navai 
In this image (Fig.3), marchers use attire such as feathered headdresses as
well as paint associated with their indigenous tribes combined with text
reading “demarcation now”. In the context of a march, tribal attire is
immediately registered and interpreted by viewers as a form of
indigenous protest. Whether painted, undressed or adorned, the body as
canvas is another aesthetic tool of dissent.
The prominence of images of indigenous women compared to their relatively small
numbers in the March point to another way visuals facilitate transnational feminist
agendas: archives of protest may, in a small way, seek to address asymmetries of power.
For instance, even though MMMD organizers redistributed funds to finance resource-
poor women’s attendance, the absolute numbers of attendees still favor women with
socio-economic privilege. And yet, visual renderings may communicate and
“redistribute” presence in less numerically absolute terms.
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(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/snyder5.png)
[Figure 4] Photo Credit: Rafaela Martins
The Santa Vagina (the holy vagina, Fig. 4) is connected to other feminist
movements’ uses of pussy iconography. To consider the travels of this
iconography as a worthy object of study reflects a key tenant of
transnational feminisms. Reading the Santa Vagina as a heuristic device,
the religious reference speaks to the specificities of the Latin Americas,
where the Catholic church played a prominent role in colonization and
continues to influence policy related to women’s bodies and autonomy. [11]
The bearers of the “saint” wore hijabs, to make a statement about how
religious institutions, in general, often oppresses women.
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(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/snyder6-.png)
[Figure 5] Photo Credit: Márcia Navai
Transnational feminist approaches pay attention to multi-directional flows
of people and ideas. Here (Fig. 5) a Mozambique activist joins Brazilians in
protesting “Fora Temer”. [12] At the MMMD, Brazilians used the
opportunity of such an international gathering to amplify local agendas
like “Fora Temer,” and these causes then became part of transnational
feminist consciousness. Also typical of feminist protests are flags and
banners of various movements and groups.
Beyond the audiovisual committee and the mainstream and alternative media
professionals who covered the event, participants helped in the registration and
circulation of audiovisuals. [13] Rare were the protesters who did not use their cell
phones or cameras to take at least one image, so that they might record their memories
of that unique moment of unity and strength on the part of women and of LGBTQ+
folks. Short visits to pages on the social networks of various people participating in the
meeting and the March gave the notion that what we did in the name of women’s rights
[14] was expanding into dimensions physical presence alone could never reach. [15]
The very visuality of the March has become an icon for feminisms, acquiring great
symbolic value for its physical size, aided by the registry of audiovisual resources. In
addition to the latent memory of the 10,000 people who physically participated, the
images spread through social networks, reaching tens of thousands of viewers, inspired
to share – through images – narratives of feminisms and of women’s movements that
are active and current. This image (Fig. 5) of organizers from Mozambique and Brazil
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holding the WWC banner facing an impressive row of press corps hints at the level of
visual coverage the protest received.
(https://adanewmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/snyder6-1.png)
[Figure 6] Photo Credit: Beatriz Tramontin
Posters, songs and cries of struggle about issues like sexuality, abortion,
racism, disability, violence, land rights, and environmental justice brought
such topics into evidence and debate, gaining strength and power as they
were visualized and heard through these media. Even so, RBS TV (Rede
Brasil Sul, The Southern Brazil Network Group), the largest
communication network in the state of Santa Catarina [16], erroneously
reported that the March was just one more “Fora Temer” (“Get Out,
Temer”) protest. One of the March’s prompts was certainly outrage over
Brazil’s current administration, but the way the mainstream news media
presented the March’s goals signals an attempt to erase its feminist
political character and its central demand – women’s rights – a discourse
which has been expropriated and watered down by governments both
throughout Brazil and across multiple locations and levels. Failing to
circumvent the grandeur of the protest, which was widely reported by
other media and networks, RBS used the power of its reach to modify the
content of the March’s claim, seeking, once again, to render invisible
women and LGBTQ+ communities, as per usual in Brazil and in most parts
of the world. The alternative media, as is common in times of repression,
maintained pressure on mainstream and conservative news outlets and
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held them accountable to the facts. While these outlets – in this case Media
Ninja, Portal Catarinas, Maruim and Desacato, among others – provide
coverage with few financial and material resources, they remained
significant in terms of addressing the substance and demands of the
protest organizers and attendees.
After the heat of the event cools (the repertoire), the richness of the captured material
(the archive) presents other challenges: how should the collection be shared? With
whom? For what purposes? How may we think of these registries in a way that is less
ephemeral? How can we increase access to captured and archived material, especially
for activists, feminists and researchers? How do these messages translate across locals,
or do they fail to do so? What do the archive’s travels indicate about transnational
feminisms and feminist forms of protest?
Conclusions: Politics of Protest, Temporalities of Dissent
Oppression knows no borders, therefore struggles against it must also work to build
transnational solidarities. The WWC/FG and the MMMD demonstrate that visualizing
protest is key to alternative worldmaking. Reading protest as performance, and
interpreting visuals as part of the aesthetics of dissent, honors other ways of knowing
and creating knowledge. Moreover, we suggest that visual renderings might be more
capacious translators of feminist politics than written word alone. The MMMD’s visuals
illustrate key tenants of transnationalism; for instance, organizers attempted to address
asymmetries of power by prominently featuring the demands of indigenous women,
and images from the March recognized objects like pussy iconography as transnational
symbols whose particularities reflect local context. Also, both the archive and the
repertoire of the protest facilitate multidirectional exchanges of people and ideas. The
MMMD speaks to a current way of doing politics, which operates through images, and
courses through networks at transnational scales. In a sense, the dream of a feminist
siblinghood is still alive, often made possible by exchanges of knowledge and contacts
through social networks and communication channels such as Facebook and YouTube.
The dissemination and sharing of academic knowledge also begin to appropriate these
tools.
Transnationality in women’s and Latin American women’s movements has often been
viewed via a model of solidarity between women in the United States and Europe
towards Latin American women, by way of financing projects, helping implement
action plans, conducting educational missions and even “teaching” or providing texts
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about the role of women (Thayer, 2001). However, what we see in the MMMD was
something different from this type of “transnationality”; it was much more horizontal,
with indigenous women, Afro-descendants and peasants taking a leading role. The
MMMD represented a popular feminism, but closely followed, encouraged, acclaimed,
and assumed, by all the women who were there – Latin American, African, Asian,
European and North American.
The visual production had a fundamental role of representing the March, and these
representations were replicated and reshaped in social and traditional media, as well
as in memory. Specific aspects of the MMMD become accessible to all, and it is possible
to relive the emotion and affect. As Sara Ahmed explores in Living a Feminist Life
(2017), feminism is a political movement and it is also part of our bodies, an affective
movement. At the protest (IRL), we experienced the sensations of strength and unity, of
taking over the city, of being together, of shouting at the top of our lungs, all in the
center of the downtown, which is a confrontational space. Facilitated by the archive –
and via the media, the photos and films in circulation, and a documentary in the
process of being made and distributed – the protest continues happening long after
August 2, 2017 when the March took place. Through ongoing circulation, transnational
feminist networks build and strengthen. Feminists visualize and begin to realize a
world spelled out in the March’s protest songs (which can be heard in the video below):
Se cuida, se cuida, se cuida seu machista – America Latina vai ser toda feminista; Take
care, take care, take care Mr. misogynist – All of Latin America will be feminist!
 
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—CITATION— 
Snyder, Cara, Veiga, Ana Maria & Wolff, Cristina Schiebe (2018) ““América Latina Vai
Ser Toda Feminista”: Visualizing & Realizing Transnational Feminisms in the Women’s
Worlds March for Rights.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.
14. 10.5399/uo/ada.2018.14.2
 
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)  
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
Footnotes    ( returns to text)
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1. This article is written in what the Sangtin Collective refers to as a
“blended we”. Even as we have experienced the march (and its
organization) differently, the voices of all three authors have been
woven together to produce one narrative (Nagar & Sangtin Writers,
2006).
2. The archive of photos and videos documenting the Congress come from
varied sources: a team of journalists, film and journalism students, and
the filmmaker/photographer Marcia Navai, who hopes to create a
documentary about the event. Navai, who has access to all the sources,
also gathered coverage from alternative media sources including Portal
Catarinas and Midia Ninja.
3. In her text Alphabet Soup?, Brazilian feminist theorist and
anthropologist Regina Facchini (2005) tracks the use of acronyms used
to describe queer communities in Brazil. The acronyms moved from
GLS (gay, lesbian, travesti) to GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender) in the early 1990s to the more expansive LGBTQIA+ that
denominates trans and includes queer or questioning, intersex, asexual
or aromatic, and + to represent all the identities that are unnamed in
this acronym. Hereafter, we will use the shortened version, LGBTQ +,
with an understanding that this term includes a wider range of
identities than listed in the acronym.
4. It is worth noting that the lack of funding and reliance on volunteer
labor is another transnational truth of feminist form of protest. In this
case, the authors would especially like to recognize the work of
numerous student laborers, Marcia Navai (mentioned above), Sandra
Alves from Midia Ninja, and the reporters from Portal Catarinas.
5. The main social network used in Brazil is Facebook, followed by
Instagram and Twitter. These were the main networks to advertise and
circulate material about the event.
6. Tent programming refers to activities that took place in large, covered
tents with the following themes: Women’s World Tent, Feminine Tent
and Solidarity and Health Tent.
7. The official website of Ni Una Menos movement is:
https://niunamenos.com.ar/ (https://niunamenos.com.ar/)
8. Demarcation, demarcação in Portuguese, refers to the officialization (or
reappropriation) of indigenous territory, which has been historically
expropriated by landowners and agribusiness in Brazil.
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9. In Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages, she proposes that assemblages
are “attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space,
and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency”; and in this
way, assemblage creates a “side-ways” reading of identity, one that
accounts for “emotions, energies, affectivities, textures as they inhabit
events, spatiality, and corporealities” (Puar, 2007: 128). Identities form
and un-form in her assemblage, they move fluidly and in that fluidity,
spaces for activism open up. The embodied elements of protests involve
sight, sound, smell, taste, energy, place, people. Live transmission may
capture the sounds, sights, people and place.
10. Furthermore, archived materials are always corruptible via removal
and manipulation.
11. See The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and
Globalization by Alys Weinbaum for an example of transnational
feminist use of heuristic device (2008).
12. Fora Temer refers to protests calling for the dismissal of the current
Brazilian president, Michel Temer, who was brought to power after the
removal (which many consider a constitutional coup) of Dilma Rousseff,
the first woman elected President of the Republic in Brazil.
13. In this context, mainstream media denotes the Globo conglomerate,
Record, and SBT (Sistema Brasileira de Televisão). These are the
companies which provide open access television. Alternative media
here refers to Ninja Media, Portal Catarinas, Maruim and Desacato.
14. To read more about the organizer’s goals, click here
(https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1wzI41gPrjmdXplMDhITXJnYmVUN0VqMENLN1dpaHFkbEdV/view)
to access the March’s manifesto.
15. The traffic around posts from high profile activists in attendance, like
Monique Prada from CUTS (Central Única de Trabalhadoras e
Trabalhadores Sexuais, a center for women workers and sex workers),
and Indianara Siqueira from Casa Nem (a home for transgender and
transexual sex workers), suggest the enormity of the March’s reach and
impact. Still, as with any grass-roots social media phenomena,
organizers lose control over the coverage. We will never fully be able to
know or track the extent or effect of the March’s media coverage.
16. The network, at the time called RBS (Grupo Rede Brasil Sul, The
Southern Brazil Network Group), is a local affiliate of the Globo
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network, and now has been sold NSC (Noticias Santa Cantarina, Santa
Catarina News).
13TH WOMEN’S WORLDS CONGRESS BRAZIL PEER REVIEWED PROTEST
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS
WOMEN’S WORLDS MARCH FOR RIGHTS (MARCHA MUNDOS DE MULHERES POR DIREITOS)
Cara K. Snyder (https://adanewmedia.org/author/carasnyder)
Cara Snyder is a PhD student in the Women’s Studies Department at the University of
Maryland. Her research focuses on transnational feminisms, the transnational Americas, and
physical cultural (sports) studies. Prior to beginning her doctorate, Cara lived and worked in
Brazil as a Fulbright scholar and Professor at the Instituto Federal do Sertão Pernambucano
and the Universidade Federal do Vale do São Francisco.
Dr. Ana Maria Veiga (https://adanewmedia.org/author/anaveiga)
Dr. Ana Maria Veiga is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba. She was
the coordinator of programming and communication for the 13th Women’s Worlds Congress
/ Fazendo Gênero 11. Her research focuses on cinema, media, image, gender and
feminisms. She also has professional experience in media production. She completed her
post-doctoral work in the Interdisciplinary Program for Humanities and Social Sciences at
the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina between 2015 and 2017.
Dr. Cristina Scheibe Wolff (https://adanewmedia.org/author/cristinawolff)
Dr. Cristina Scheibe Wolff is a full Professor of History at the Federal University of Santa
Catarina (UFSC). She was the General Coordinator of 13th Women’s Worlds Congress /
Fazendo Gênero 11 and she is one of the Editors of Revista Estudos Feministas
(www.scielo.br/ref). Her research focuses on gender, feminisms and emotions in the
Dictatorships in South America. She was the Fulbright Chair of Brazilian Studies at
University of Massachusetts- Amherst, Fall 2017 and is invited researcher in the Arenes
Laboratory of CNRSS, France, Université de Rennes 2 for 2018.
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