Chair: Gaia Giuliani (CES)


Overview

In this seminar, Lívia de Souza Lima will present some aspects of her Doctoral research, which delves into the political exercise of four Black women who served as elected representatives in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro between 2019 and 2022, namely Enfermeira Rejane, Mônica Francisco, Renata Souza and Dani Monteiro. Framed within a radical democratic approach to political representation, this research explores how Black women, organised around the articulation of occupying spaces of power and collective decision-making, have been contributing to the enlargement of the field of social and political struggles inside political institutions. Moreover, talking about Black women in the institutional sphere in Brazil also reflects the urgency to discuss over the events that preceded and followed the assassination of Marielle Franco, mainly taking into account Black women who have been resisting the attempts the repertoires of silencing and invisibilising their voices in the country.

With a focus on the performatic aspect of political representation, the main object of this research is to get to know the discursive chains of Black women in power, in order to unveil how these agents are imagining or rather (re)imagining politics with their physical, symbolic and substantive presence in institutions traditionally occupied by white masculinities. By considering the relation between these bodies, the space and the relationships generated with this occupation, this research aims to reveal the tensions involved in this occupation, and the responses and repertoires of resistance employed by Black women in this regard. Inspired by Maria Lugones and her methodological notes on the praxis decolonial feminism, the focus on the agency of Black women functions as a lens to uncover resistance and the very structures and practices of domination that subalternised subjects and identities stand in opposition to.
With a focus on the archive of representative claims Black women construct about similarly marginalised groups, i.e. women, Black women, favelas and peripheries, Black people and LGBTQIA+ groups, this project posits that a political imagination that aims to reconfigure the current status of political institutions, is possible to be grasped and discerned by giving attention to the representative claims made on behalf of groups historically excluded from the realms of political power.

Adopting the premise that institutional resistance is indeed possible, this project works further with the assumption that resistance is a process fraught with limitations, and that the attention given to such limitations is critical to visualize and identify the aspects of domination proving to be most fixed and challenging, thus requiring continuous scrutiny.
 

Bio note

Lívia De Souza Lima is a PhD candidate in InterAmerican Studies at Universität Bielefeld and a fellow at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Her main research focus lies in the intersection of gender, race, political representation and performance. Her PhD project is centred on the political performances of Black women elected politicians in Brazil, where she seeks to uncover an emerging re-imagination of political institutions and the politics of representation.She is the Co-leader of Working Group 3 at the Cost Action Decolonising Development and was a visiting researcher at CES in October, 2023. Lívia Lima is also the co-founder of Hamburg-based feminist collective Miradas Feministas, a group of Women who are committed to work on the German/European regimes of visibility of Latin American women knowledges, and practices of resistance. 

Recent publications: 
Co-editor of the upcoming volume 'Feminisms in Movement. Theories and Practices from the Americas.' Transcript, Bielefeld, 2024 
Violence Against Black Women in Politics: Experiences and Testimonials from Brazil, Femina Politica, 2022, with Ligia Fabris and Mayra Goulart da Silva

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