Contemporary feminist engagement with political theatre in Brazil began in the 1960s, in the wake of the struggle for human rights and the freedom of women, blacks, homosexuals and other so-called minorities all over the world, though it has diminished in intervening years. The causes of this setback were political closure, as a result of the civil–military coup of 1964, as well as of the following social, economic and political changes.
Writing about the suppression of political rights during the dictatorship that followed the 1964 coup, Roberto Schwarz comments on the differences in the process of limiting freedoms across multiple social strata of Brazilian society.Footnote 1 First, the weight of prison and torture was felt by the campesinos (rural workers) and blue-collar workers. In the rising violence, students and political leaders were the next to be affected. From 1968 on, intellectuals and artists were already a recurring presence in lists of missing persons and people who ‘committed suicide’.
Cynthia Andersen Sarti argues that coercive mechanisms affected women in particular ways, compounded by the fact that the repressive agents were almost all white males.Footnote 2 What we saw happen was an intense campaign carried out by the mass media, supported by state institutions, in which women were devalued. Considered the enemy of bourgeois, homeland and family values, the ‘feminist’ was condemned to ridicule and restricted from spaces of public expression, which became increasingly naturalized in Brazilian society. This campaign was met with Brazilian women's widespread acceptance of their own submission, respecting the most traditional social roles of men and women.
The banning of debates about gender inequality in the performing arts continued to occur in the next century, compounded by the devaluing of the ideological dimension of theatrical craft. The ‘rebirth’ of national feminisms and feminist expression in theatre took time to be noticed, coming to occur only after the mid-2010s. It was at that moment that the theatrical field witnessed the return of theatrical groups, exclusive to women and of mixed genders, investigating new forms of representation of women and igniting a feminist imagination all over the country – women and artists not afraid of calling themselves feminists.
In those intervening years, women artists from diverse backgrounds increasingly dedicated their actions to focusing on femicide, domestic violence, harassment, sorority, desire, ancestry, reproductive rights, self-writing, transgender representation, anti-coloniality, equal rights, prejudice, combative poetics and so many other themes dear to the feminist agenda. Feminist artists’ performances occupied streets, theatres and art galleries, with work that blurred frontiers between theatre and other performative languages, in interdisciplinary and undisciplined ways. Theatre festivals committed to having women as protagonists. The growth of the teatro das oprimidas (theatre of the female oppressed), which revised Augusto Boal's teatro do oprimido (theatre of the oppressed), demonstrated the vitality of this feminist upsurge. These shifts were supported by dialogues between gender studies and theatre studies within the academy.
Several social movements, marches and campaigns amplified feminist struggles, mobilizing new generations of women to fan the flame of emancipation among women theatre workers. For example, the growth of feminist theatre took place adjacent to the public inquiry about the ‘speech space’ of the so-called minorities, fighting against the privileges of whiteness and cisnormativity, and speaking about unfixed identities.Footnote 3 We owe this necessary examination of our ways of life to the long struggle of black people, homosexuals, transgender people and transvestites, with whom women share a history of oppression. The cooperation between artists and theatre researchers and other professionals in these movements proved to be fundamental to the fortification of contemporary Brazilian feminist theatre.
The example of the Cia. Capulanas de Arte Negra
It is not easy to highlight a single example in this large movement, but I will profile the Cia. Capulanas de Arte Negra (Capulanas Company of Black Art), due to the unprecedented nature of its composition and aims, and the considerable success it has achieved. The Capulanas was founded in 2007 in Jardim São Luiz, a neighbourhood located in the South Zone of the most populous city in Latin America, São Paulo, by four black women – Adriana Paixão, Débora Marçal, Flávia Rosa and Priscila Obaci. Residents of the outskirts of the city, the four got together with the aim of re-creating the imagery around black women, doomed – in national theatre, cinema and television – to the stereotyped roles of the maid (i.e. wet nurse, an image inherited from slavery), the prostitute or the ‘mulatta’ (a derogatory term for people of mixed black African and white European ancestry). Capulanas became the place where they started to design spaces for black women to achieve their artistic potential.Footnote 4
The group has its headquarters – Casa Goma – in a simple house in Jardim São Luís, where they experiment with strategies to confront under-representation and structural racism through theatre. Guided by black feminism, the Capulanas develop actions directly related to the local community: centred in this territory, they serve a population that does not usually have access to cultural capital valuing black citizenship. The group's debut performance was Solano Trindade e Suas Negras Poesias (Solano Trindade and His Black Poetry) (2010), which rewrote the poetry of Trindade, an author from Pernambuco, from a black perspective. Since then, the stagings of the Capulanas have occupied the rooms and backyard of Casa Goma, as well as the neighbourhood's backyards and theatre stages across the country.
Sangoma: Saúde à Mulher Negra (Sangoma: Health to the Black Woman) (2013) focused on the care between Afro-descendent women and forms of spiritual and physical healing, via the cultivation of ancestral bonds in order to overcome the social processes that generate illness. Ialodês: Um manifesto da cura ao gozo (Ialodês: A Manifesto of Healing to Enjoyment) (2018), the next piece, merges experiential accounts with Afro-futuristic aesthetics in order to promote the empowerment of black women, reconfiguring African rites and cosmology.
In addition to the performances, Capulanas created reflection groups on feminism and blackness, using theatre as an instrument for dialogue and direct intervention. They named these groups after ONNIMs – an Adinkra symbol of the Akan peoples of West Africa. ONNIM can be translated as the continuous search for knowledge, signalling the interest of this feminist theatrical group in building the necessary transformation of a society where feminism – as a social, political and theatrical practice – needs to account for the intersections of gender, class and race–ethnicity.
The political climate and theatre education
The conquest of space by Cia. Capulanas represents the reconquest of a more democratic political arena in Brazil, which constituted an effervescent public theatrical art, able to add more and more women and black artists to their ranks. But this re-flourishing of a national feminist theatre that accompanied the election of the first female president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, was succeeded by the fascist climate engulfing the country since her deposition in 2016, and even more strongly since the 2018 presidential elections. Bolsonaro's election as president has resulted in the gradual suppression of the non-aligned's freedom to exist. A plan of neoliberal governance was installed, promoting the devastation of forests, the rampant advance on indigenous lands and nature reserves, and the ruination of public healthcare, even during a pandemic that the administration did not take seriously.
The biggest cuts in government investments are in the social, labour and cultural areas. The cut in the education portfolio, for instance, has meant a decrease in lending practices that directly affected federal institutions.Footnote 5 In repeated declarations, the Bolsonaro government has tried to show higher education and research institutions as places of economic privilege and ‘leftist’ ideology, publicly manifesting its antipathy towards professors, scientists and students.
Milton Ribeiro, the fourth minister of education in office, did nothing to stop the progressive fall of investment in Brazilian education. This fall directly affects scientific research agencies, impacting the two main ones in Brazil.Footnote 6 The new government administrative reform also strikes universities: the so-called Future-se plan promises to transform public federal institutions into autocracies.Footnote 7 The programme spreads the discourse of sustainability, or, in other words, makes way for tuition charging and privatization (disguised as public–private partnership), going against the Brazilian Constitution, which establishes the autonomy of universities. These actions evidence not only the bond between government and moralizing and rightist forces, with the support of the evangelical, ruralist and pro-gun caucuses of the National Congress, but also its alliance with major financial groups, represented in Brazil by banks and international conglomerates, including educational ones. Once again, the distribution of damages and benefits is not experienced equally by individuals. For students who are black, indigenous, disabled, poor or arriving at the university from public schools, financial aid is fundamental.
‘Gender ideology’ against diversity
The government's harshest criticism has fallen upon the humanities, with a special focus on history, philosophy and sociology (the arts, in their vision, are not even considered). In April 2019, ex-minister of education Abraham Weintraub announced that Brazil should respect taxpayers’ money, defending the idea that the public contribution to higher education should concentrate on useful areas that ‘generate income, well-being for the family, that improve the society around them’.Footnote 8 According to him, priority areas are medicine, engineering and veterinary studies. Never has the importance of humanities and the arts been so openly discarded.
If we look at the subject of gender in particular, the historical condition of women in Brazil has determined their exclusion from the most competitive scholarships, as well as from the field of technology and mathematics, and the repairing of the disparities that keep hindering their participation in these areas depends on public policies.Footnote 9 Added to the obstacles faced by women is the race–ethnicity factor, determining that the number of black female professors is only 0.04 per cent of the total number (according to 2016 data).Footnote 10
The ideological directive of the institutions, which has been carried out by the government through the placing of ‘partisans’ in leading positions, contributes to the exclusion of certain themes from academic, cultural and artistic discussions, while allowing the spread of a behaviour that threatens freedom of thought. Events about Marxism, feminism, ecology and sexuality are being refused,Footnote 11 while public figures are being silenced by measures restrictive of their political manifestations. And this control is programmatic: Mário Frias, the fifth Secretary of Culture, has among his promises to eliminate from the theatrical scene what the Bolsonaro group names ‘cultural Marxism’. Sérgio Camargo, president of the Palmares Foundation (a federal organization created in 1988, in defence of the cause of Afro-Brazilianity), stated in 2020 that there is no racism in Brazil. According to Camargo (appointed by the president in 2019 under protest by Brazilian black movements), the idea of a structure that oppresses and marginalizes all blacks would be a view of the left, without meaning or historical grounding. It is to sustain such untruths that the government has acted to eliminate historical memory and dissenting voices.
As a case in point, themes regarding what the government calls ‘gender ideology’ have been pushed aside. A term spread by representatives of Bolsonaro's ideological group, this designates everything related to the debate about gender hierarchies: the criticism of social roles, the expression of dissident sexualities, the defence of minority rights, feminism, etc. The fight against ‘gender ideology’ started to represent, therefore, the most combative flag to reinforce, in a conservative way, the institutions of family and religion. It is worth mentioning that ‘gender ideology’ implies a negative value of the words ‘ideology’ (as if right-wing positions were not ‘ideological’) and ‘gender’ (identified as the complete aversion to the good relationship between men and women, for denying the ‘biological truth’ and the divine will).
Minister Damares Alves, one of the two women in the twenty-two ministries of the Bolsonaro government, is head of the anti-gender struggle. Ironically, the minister runs the women, family and human rights portfolio, created in 2019, replacing the former Ministry of Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights. Alves has given inconceivable declarations that demean the image of women: she demanded that boys wear blue and girls pink, clearly stating their gender identities; defended Amazonian women receiving donations of underwear, as a way to stop harassment and abuse; and suggested that women who are victims of sexual violence be entitled to a ‘rape financial aid’ to ensure the continuation of the unwanted pregnancy and the life of the foetus. More recently, she has tried to defend the review of human rights policies, without any popular consultation. The degree of ignorance and nonsense present in the minister's discourse serves to fortify the mockery of feminist struggles and achievements, but it is also dismantling a project, among other actions: the closing of part of the national Mulher, Viver Sem Violência (‘Woman, Living without Violence’) programme.
Though the universe described here may seem far removed from the performing arts, it is likely to directly affect feminist theatre, restricting academic research and theatrical experimentation, which had only just started to expand again.
Winds of freedom in feminist theatre research and reactionary forces
My study and training trajectory, and some of the social changes I have witnessed, mirror those of some of my colleagues also working in theatre studies. During my postgraduate course in performing arts at a prestigious public university in São Paulo, I did not have any contact with gender studies and feminist criticism, themes that were absent from the curriculum and class content. Feminist discussion in the performing arts was, from 1964, a target of a political–ideological curtailment, subjected to a programme of public demoralization and historical erasure.Footnote 12
When I decided to get a PhD on feminist creation in contemporary theatre questioning the silencing of the Brazilian political theatre, focused on gender matters, I faced an almost absolute lack of sources in Portuguese of women's movements and feminist epistemology in the theatre between 1920 and 2000. In 2011, when I established myself as a professor at another public university, working in a theatre department, I witnessed the research area of my PhD gain the approval of my peers and, gradually, gather more and more young researchers, driven by the critical revision of theatre proposed by feminist studies, as well as by the understanding of gender as a category of analysis. The phenomenon was not restricted to the academy, nor to my inner circle: amateur and professional feminist theatre groups started to spread, including groups led by black and peripheral women, something completely unusual in Brazilian theatre until that point.
This happened in 2015 while the streets of our big cities were taken by the ‘Brazilian Feminist Spring’, making visible the recovery of feminist militance and growth in the awareness of gender inequality and intersectionality with sexuality, social class and ethnicity–race markers. This mobilization expressed the perception that social and legal achievements in favour of women were being reversed. At that moment, the step backwards responded to the orders of the Brazilian Congress, led by the evangelical caucus ruling on the right to decide public health policies for women. After that, the evangelical advance joined militarism, nationalism and an unprecedented neoliberalism, bringing to light present-day Brazilian neo-fascism, openly against the feminist cause.
The present moment puts my fellow theatre researchers and myself – men and women – close to losing the already limited working conditions that we have been experiencing for a few years. The context shows that the decision of where and how to spend public funding follows political guidelines in the midst of a systemic crisis disguised as a cyclical one. The most recent changes also prove that a highly efficient way of preventing the development of a field such as theatre research, or of a particular approach such as feminist theatre, is economic censorship. This strangulation will take place first, and is likely to be followed by other sanctions.
It is not the loss of personal achievements that is regrettable here, but the interruption of the process which groups like Cia. Capulanas de Artes Negra had put in motion: as Angela Davis summarizes, when black women move, the whole structure of society moves with them.Footnote 13 The creative freedom and the political awareness that Capulanas was able to exercise shows the beginning of a destabilization of the values linked to patriarchy and capitalism in our society.
Conclusion
In light of the fertility of the feminist theatrical scene since 2010 in Brazil, the silencing of this type of production for almost forty years seems to be incoherent. Yet it is an important reminder of the fragility of transformations in gender relations in Brazil, and the ever-present possibility of a backlash. As feminist scholars and artists, we must continue to fight for the rights and interests of women in theatre, culture, society and the academy. Thus freedom will be demystified and emancipation will be possible for all.
