Description
The AIDS movement has been central to advancing public health and human rights, particularly in Brazil, where activism reshaped treatment access and state policy. This article examines how actors within Brazil’s AIDS movement responded unevenly to the rise of far-right religious conservatism in the 2010s. While research on repression and social movements often emphasizes external constraints, less attention has been paid to internal differentiation within movements facing authoritarian drift.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice – especially his notions of field (structured arenas of power and struggle), capital (resources such as expertise or moral authority), habitus (dispositions shaped by experience), and hysteresis (the mismatch between dispositions and changing contexts) – I conceptualize the AIDS movement as a subfield within the broader AIDS policy field.
Based on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the article identifies three strategic responses to the conservative turn: silent resistance, persistence, and adaptation. These position-takings reflect distinct activist trajectories and unequal distributions of cultural, social, and militant capital. As the political field shifted, symbolic capital accumulated during earlier progressive cycles lost value, producing crises of meaning for some and new forms of legitimacy for others.
The article offers a Bourdieusian, relational account of how internal dynamics shape movements’ capacity to adapt – or fracture – under political pressure, contributing to comparative and international studies of activism in times of democratic erosion.
