Anti-gender and racist neoconservative movements in Brazil and Latin America have expanded in the 21stcentury. They have been enacted through various forms of political violence and reactionary uses of law. In Brazil, political violence based on gender and race has been denounced by politicians and civil society organizations fighting against homo/transphobia and racism. Among other strategies of resistance, they have mobilized law and justice while constructing dissident memories of the present and the past.

However, most research on anti-gender political violence has overlooked how legal mobilization contributes to, and is based on, memory and justice mobilizations. This literature tends also to ignore how progressive LGBTQIA+ and Black activists fight against political violence through memory-justice mobilizations. The emblematic case of Marielle Franco –a bisexual, Black woman politician (Socialism and Liberty Party-Rio de Janeiro) who was assassinated in 2018 –sparked numerous practices of resistance through the mobilization of memory-justice at local and transnational scales. In 2019, her family created the Instituto Marielle Franco to promote memory-justice and combat political violence based on gender and race.

This seminar draws on archival research on the Institute’s memory-justice mobilizations to recount and analyze their strategies and tactics of resistance. The analysis is based on an intersectional, counter-storytelling, and queer perspective on memory, justice, and political violence.

Activity within the Doctoral Programme Human Rights in Contemporary Societies


Bio note

Cecília MacDowell Santos holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Berkeley and a Master in Law from the University of São Paulo. She is Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco (USF). At CES she lectures in the PhD programs on "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies" and "Sociology of the State, Law, and Justice". Her current research interests center on two subject areas: discourses and practices on violence against women and legal mobilization of human rights at the local, national and transnational scales. Within the first subject area, she has studied the relations between the State, the criminal justice system and the women's movements in Brazil, with a focus on laws and policies to confront domestic violence against women. Regarding the second subject area, she has studied transnational legal mobilization for women's human rights, indigenous rights, and the right to political memory, especially in the contexts of Brazil and the inter-American system of human rights.

She has also focused her studies on transnational legal mobilization of human rights in the Portuguese and European context. She is the author of Women's Police Stations: Gender, Violence, and Justice in São Paulo, Brazil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), editor of A Mobilização Transnacional do Direito: Portugal e o Tribunal Europeu dos Direitos Humanos (Almedina Press, 2012), and co-editor of Violências contra Mulheres, Feminismos & Direitos: Análises Interseccionais e Decoloniais (Lumen Juris Press, 2023), Quem Precisa dos Direitos Humanos? Precariedades, Diferenças, Interculturalidades (Almedina Press, 2019), Desarquivando a Ditadura: Memória e Justiça no Brasil (Hucitec Press, 2009) and Repressão e Memória Política no Contexto Ibero-Brasileiro: Estudos sobre Brasil, Guatemala, Moçambique, Peru e Portugal (Ministério da Justiça do Brasil, 2010).