Afro brazilian women struggle for social justice

BENVGPU4: Gender Policy and Planning Afro-Brazilian Women Movements and Their Struggle for Social Justice and Inclusion in the Light of Brazilian Citizenship Candidate number: NKDS5 Submission Date: April 24th 2017 Number of words: 3026

Introduction

In the last decades, citizenship has been a recurrent subject in several fields and actors’ discourses, creating a set of different understandings and implications related to them. One important argument is that citizenship plays a crucial role in social and political integration, working as a unifying element for the struggle of different minorities and excluded groups. As explained by Dagnino, “[the notion of citizenship] has spread as a common reference among a variety of social movements, such as those of women, blacks and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, retired and senior citizens, environmentalists, urban and rural workers and those organised in the large cities around urban issues such as housing, health, education, unemployment, violence, etc.” (Dagnino, 2005:149). Their unity in the common fight for equal rights strengthen their movements, which can, subsequently, be channelled to their specific demands.

The original general concept of citizenship - of full participation of citizens in society however, was appropriated by neoliberal discourses that re-signified its interpretation and used it to legitimise the state withdrawn from its role as guarantor of rights. This approach promotes an idea of citizenship that is “limited to legal provisions (…) [and] focus on gaining access and membership in an already existing political system, by its emphasis on citizens” (Caldwell, 2007:134). Therefore, being used in this way, the concept of citizenship modifies its initial character and starts serving as a tool for exclusion, rather than inclusion.

This essay aims to examine these different meanings of citizenship, contrasting the opposite notions of the neoliberal and feminist citizenship, to argue in favour of a kind of citizenship that comprises not only the political and economic sense, but that operates also as a tool for social justice and inclusion. As pointed by Lister, the idea of “[an] inclusive citizenship [that] is as much about recognition as about access to formal rights” (Lister, 2007:51) and identified

by Isin and Turner that considers “a sociologically informed definition of citizenship in which the emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings, and identities” (Isin and Turner in Lister, 2007:51).

These different concepts of citizenship will be used to shed light into the Afro-Brazilian women’s movements for inclusion and their historical fight for substantive civil and political 2

rights. The essay will, thus, analyse the emergence of the discussion of citizenship in the Brazilian society and the importance of citizenship from the point of view of the excluded groups, considering the values of social justice, recognition and self-determination associated with them (Kabeer, 2005:3).

This analysis aims to bring Walby’s questioning, “is it [citizenship] a concept which can be successfully universalist, or is it always affected by deeply rooted social divisions of gender, class and ethnicity?” (Walby, 1994:379) to the Brazilian context, while considering the concept of citizenship as “a crucial weapon, not only in the struggle against social and economic exclusion and inequality but – most importantly – in the widening of dominant conceptions of politics itself” (Dagnino, 2005:150).

The Different Understandings of Citizenship

Citizenship, due to its multiple concepts and interpretations, has been used by both Right and Left groups to support their own ideas in different fields of study. On the one side, the Right group advocates for a neoliberal concept of citizenship, that considers it to be a means of gaining political rights and membership to an existing legal system. This neoliberal approach promotes an individualistic understanding of citizenship, which considers the citizen as a universal persona with individual rights and obligations, with no regards to a collectivity or community. Citizenship is, thus, a relationship between the individual and the state. As explained by Yuval-Davies, “the liberal definition of citizenship constructs all citizens as basically the same and considers the differences of class, ethnicity, gender, etc., as irrelevant to their status as citizens” (Yuval-Davies, 1999-8).

The neoliberal view, thus, considers individuals as being equal, gender-less, class-less, raceless, and so on, grounding the ‘universal’ citizen on the dominant white, able-bodied, middleclass man. This enables the exclusion, not only of women, but of other minorities, such as black and ethnic, disabled, the lower classes, etc., from the access to citizenship rights. Contrasting to that idea, the feminist approach displays the importance of recognising the social and cultural identity differences within individuals. They highlight the problems that emerge from the universalistic notion by “expos[ing] how, despite its claims to universalism, citizenship was 3

drawn according to a quintessentially male template so that women’s exclusion (and the chequered nature of their inclusion) was integral to both the theory and practice of citizenship” (Lister, 2007:52).

Besides interpreting citizenship as the ‘universal individual membership to the political rights’, the neoliberal approach considers that this access is promoted by the “individual integration into market as consumer and producer” (Dagnino, 2005:159). In such view, citizenship is accessible to individuals that participate in the free market, as paid workers and consumers.

Hence, the citizen continues to be portrayed as the male breadwinner, excluding marginalised groups, such as informal workers, homeless people and women who are responsible for unpaid care work from its range of participation.

As a result, this market-led citizenship weakens the state’s role as guarantor of rights, allowing for civil society organisations to assume functions and responsibilities associated with the provision of services. Hence, social rights are removed from the state’s obligation and transformed into solidarity work provided by the third sector and private companies. The market appears, thus, as the space to exercise citizenship. As argued by Dagnino, “Such resignifications of citizenship and solidarity block out their political dimension and erase references to public responsibility and public interests. (…) The favoured allocation of social services now occupies the place formerly held by rights and citizenship, and institutional channels for claiming rights have been replaced by appeals to the goodwill and competence of the relevant sectors” (Dagnino, 2005:161).

Once again, the consequences of this approach are harder on women and other social minority groups and individuals. Women, in that case, are the ones that must compensate for the state retreat in order to continue to fulfil their reproductive role. Ultimately, they are more enclosed in the private household and more excluded from the public and political sphere. This is especially problematic when we recall that “citizenship, especially the political aspect1 of this, has historically been bound up with participation in the public sphere” (Walby, 1994:385).

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Sylvia Walby considers T.H. Marshal’s citizenship definition in her arguments. He contemplates that citizenship

has three elements: civil, political and social. The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom. The political element means the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such body. The social element means the range from the right to economic welfare and security, to the right to share the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to standards prevailing in the society. (Marshall in Walby, 1994:380).

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Considering this brief analysis, it is arguable that due to its universalistic and market-led approaches, the neoliberal citizenship agenda enhances exclusion, misdistribution and misrecognition of social minorities. In opposition to that, Left groups and grassroots movements adopted the ideas of citizenship that emerged from the feminist approach, “as a more total relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging” (Werbner and Yuval-Davies in Lister, 2007:52). In that sense, citizenship would be an inclusionary construction, based on everyday life processes, encompassing the differences between groups and individuals and how these differences result in specific needs that will be responsible for informing their specific claims.

The Afro-Brazilian’s Historical Struggle for Basic Rights

The idea of citizenship as an inclusionary construction is particularly important in the context of Brazilian society. Brazil is a country with high rates of social and racial inequality and segregation. The last national census made in the country, in 2015, resulted that 54% of the total population considered itself as black, however, among the poorest 10% of the population, 75% is constituted by black people. On the other end of the spectrum, out of the 1% richest, only 17,8% is constituted of the same group (IBGE, 2015).

These rates are a sample of how race and class are intertwined in the Brazilian context, giving clarity to the argument that the marginalisation suffered by these groups is not only based on economic issues, but also due to racial and cultural misrecognition and disrespect, which is entrenched in Brazilian culture. As argued by Kia Caldwell, “In a society in which inequality is so internalised as to constitute the cultural forms through which people relate to each other in everyday life, the notion of equal rights which characterizes the idea of citizenship has to confront the authoritarian culture which permeates all social relations” (Caldwell, 2007:134).

Such inequality comes from a historical background of more than three hundred years of slavery and continuous oppression, that reverberates until today. In 1888, the law responsible

Although there is a discussion to the be taken further from this definition, it is used by a large range of authors, to initiate an understanding of the elements around citizenship, that is not only about political rights.

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for ending slavery in Brazil was finally promulgated. However, after the abolition, no measures were implemented to include the African and Afro-Brazilian liberated slaves in the ‘formal’ society. There was, for example, no action to enable access to land and housing or paid jobs, hence former slaves had to compete with the whites and immigrants, most often skilled and without the label of recent slavery. The freed men and women were also on the margins of health and education policies, preventing them from exercising true citizenship.

Therefore, “class, race and gender differences constitute the main bases for the extreme social stratification that has historically pervaded [Brazilian] culture, hierarchically positioning different categories of people in their respective ‘places’ in society. Thus, for excluded sectors, the political implications of the cultural meanings embedded in social practices are part of their daily life (…) to be poor means not only economic, material deprivation, but also submission to cultural rules that convey a complete lack of recognition of poor people as subjects-bearers of rights” (Dagnino, 2005:153). These groups and individuals’ marginalisation emerges from a system that creates and perpetuates inequality in all spheres of life, thus they are socially, culturally, economically, politically and spatially excluded from society. They face daily difficulties to fulfil their basic needs, such access to water, sanitation, shelter, health and so forth, in a continuous fight to prove their ‘right to have rights’.

It is possible to observe in several distinct contexts, that the ones who are in the frontline of this fight for basic needs are women. That happens due to their responsibility around their reproductive role and its relationship with access to resources to fulfil survival needs.

Therefore, the Afro-Brazilian women movement arises from this context of marginalisation and segregation, representing the struggle for basic rights, as a group that feels in their everyday existence the heavy consequences of the biased intersectionality of gender, class and race, having to “face the triple discrimination as women, poor people, and blacks” (Carneiro in Perry, 2005:13). While this intersectionality makes the fight even harder, it is also responsible for the development of their claims, from class-based struggle over everyday life material resources into a more comprehensive prerogative, over not only civil rights, but also recognition of their identity and culture.

In that sense, Afro-Brazilian women “associate their political awareness in this situation with the recognition of their own differential knowledge as women, as key members and everyday leaders of their community. From this perspective, this thing that empowers black women in 6

grassroots movements around issues of survival is their experiences, what they know about life and their position in the world” (Perry, 2005:24). Hence, Afro-Brazilian women find in their common identity a meaning to unite the group and intersect the fight for rights for basic survival, political and social participation in society and cultural recognition. It is an idea of constructing identity based on experiences, and considering this identity as basis for progressive group solidarity and political mobilization (Mohanty in Perry, 2005:24).

Inclusive Citizenship and The Recognition of Different Identities and Cultures

It is in this segregated background that the idea of citizenship as one that encompass social and cultural recognition and embrace the representation of particular groups’ specificities in citizenship claims achieves immense importance. As argued by Jan Pakulski, the idea of a “cultural citizenship in terms of: the right to be ‘different’, to revalue stigmatised identities, to embrace openly and legitimately hitherto marginalised lifestyles and to propagate them without hindrance. The national community, in other words, is defined not only in formal legal, political, and socioeconomic dimensions, but also increasingly in a sociocultural one. Full citizenship involves a right to full cultural participation and undistorted representation” (Jan Pakulski in Lister, 2007:52).

Considering the different approaches to citizenship, it is possible to encounter more than one sets of requirements that are put together in the Afro- Brazilian women movement’s quest for citizenship. On the one hand, the claim for access to resources to fulfil basic needs, that have been neglect to them historically and that deteriorates with the neoliberal governance. On the other hand, the recognition of the Afro-Brazilian identity as a part of Brazilian society’s culture.

The concept of citizenship that this group is searching for, hence, is not uniquely connected to economic redistribution and political rights (as the neoliberal approach would put it), nor only related to respect for their cultural and social differences (as contemplated by the feminist approach). It is an idea of citizenship that “includes the invention and creation of new rights that emerge from specific struggles and their concrete practices (…) [and] involves the constitution of active social subjects through their participation in claiming and redefining rights” (Caldwell, 2007:134-135). The Afro-Brazilian women movement recognises that the 7

problems of marginalisation and poverty are intrinsically related to the historical background of exclusion and the lack of recognition of their identity as part of society, as if their social identity is the one limiting the access to resources and to the tools necessary to overturn this reality.

This interrelation between economic and cultural aspects asks for different sets of responses, that include both redistribution and recognition politics. In addressing this topic, Nancy Fraser considers that “treating every practice as simultaneously economic and cultural, it must assess all of them from two different perspectives, that of distribution and that of recognition, without, however, reducing either one of these perspectives to the other. Such an approach I call ‘perspectival dualism” (Fraser, 1996:43) and argues that “more importantly, perspectival dualism appreciates that neither the politics of redistribution nor the politics of recognition can be contained within a separate sphere. The reason is that the economic and the cultural interpenetrate” (Fraser, 1996:44). This concept helps to understand and distinguish the different claims, without, however, disregarding any of them in order to promote social inclusion and participation.

One example of a measure taken by the Brazilian government that helped to achieve both recognition and redistribution is the national law to regulate domestic work, approved in 2015, popular known as ‘PEC das Domésticas’. Domestic work in Brazil is one of the many inheritances of the slavery period, therefore the workers are composed mainly by AfroBrazilian poor women. This law established a new set of regulations that increases the domestic workers economic and social security and a severe monetary punishment for the employers that disobeyed it.

Because it emerged from a long social fight from the domestic workers and it meant structural changes in the society, the law was highly published in the national media. Consequently, the domestic workers felt empowered and protected to demand the changes from their employers.

The redistribution aspect of the law is the clear economic improvements that arise from it. The recognition aspect is related to the acknowledgement of domestic work as an honest and formal job that should be appreciated.

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Conclusion

Citizenship is a crucial topic of study in the current time, as its different assumptions and discourses are capable of promoting either further exclusion or inclusion of different social groups and individuals in society. In trying to answer Sylvia Walby’s question about the universalism of citizenship, this essay analysed different meanings of the concept in the Brazilian context, focusing the analysis around Afro-Brazilian women struggle for improvements in their everyday life. In the light of this investigation, it is possible to argue that the Brazilian context is such that the different identities must be considered individually if one wants to achieve social justice. In opposition to that, the universalistic approach of citizenship enhances the exclusion of minority groups from its substantive participation in society and drives the country even further from the equality dream.

In acknowledging the intricated relation between economic marginalisation and the race and gender discrimination in their citizenship claims, the Afro-Brazilian women movement is asserting the validity of the ‘perspectival dualism’ concept coined by Nancy Fraser. They recognise that only fulfilling their economic needs will not change their social status in the long-term path for social justice. On the same way that only creating room for recognition of their culture and identity cannot be enough for changing their economic situation.

Along the above considerations, the essay argues that social inequality in Brazil is not only about economic misdistribution, but also about the racial and class discrimination entrenched in Brazilian society. Thus the fight for citizenship should not only consider political rights, but also encompass the recognition of different cultures and identities. In order to achieve social inclusion and social justice, the promotion of citizenship rights should encompass the different needs and claims of different individuals and groups of individuals, considering the specificities of each of them, especially the minorities that live within an historical process of exclusion and segregation.

Only in assessing these claims and considering both redistribution and recognition politics, Brazilian society may have an opening breach from where to change the country’s racial and class segregation reality.

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