Gender Backlashes in Latin America: the case of Brazil and Mexico
After the UN Beijing conference on women in 1995 gender policies and gender studies expanded notoriously all over Latin America. Most Latin American countries adopted new sorts of legislations and policies to improve the women situation in different areas and Gender studies became a recognized and respected field of studies intersecting with most disciplines in Social Sciences and Humanities but also with other science fields. However, several of these advances encountered serious difficulties in the form of conservative mentalities and open machista attitudes that tried to reverse the conquests women had attained. This was the case of the political representation advances that met in several cases, strategies of political harassment from social groups (mostly of men) that felt threatened by women politicians’ advances. This resistance to the feminist wave became even more open with the victory of conservative political forces, like in the case of Brazil, that reject in an open way all that has to do with what they call “the gender ideology”.
This paper will present an overview of this continental backlash and develop two cases: 1. Mexico´s contradictory trends regarding an increased political parity together with mounting rates of gender based violence and in particular political violence and 2. the case of Brazil’s recent turn to the extreme right that consolidates a trend already started some years ago regarding the questioning of gender studies as a legitimate discipline within a crusade against ‘gender ideologies’.

Edmé Domínguez R.(born in Mexico, resident in Sweden) is Associate Professor (docent) in Peace and Development Studies. She has a BA in International Relations from El Colegio de México and a PhD from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP), Paris, France. She has been working at several universities in Mexico, USA, Spain and Sweden. At present she works as lecturer in Latin American Studies, Gender studies and Global Political Economy at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. During several years she worked and published on the issues of Soviet foreign policy towards Latin America but since the beginning of the 1990s she has been working on the social and gender implications of NAFTA for Mexico, on gender issues related to citizenship, political participation, labour, transnational activism and free trade agreements particularly in the case of Mexico, El Salvador and Bolivia.

Dr Cirila Quintero, Researcher
Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico
cquintero@colef.mx

Dr Cristina Wolff
Senior lecturer, researcher
History Department
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – Brasil
cristiwolff@gmail.com