Description
In October 2025, mothers in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas searched for the bodies of their sons following the deadliest police inflicted massacre on record in the city. At the time of writing 132 people were killed in a single police operation. This paper examines the lived experiences of feminist, Black, and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders in Brazil as they navigate intensifying authoritarian violence and shrinking democratic space. Grounded in ethnographic testimonies from feminist and women activists in Brazil, the research situates their experiences within the broader framework of the Feminist Cities Colab project, shedding light on how everyday life in urban peripheries become shaped by security discourses, policing as state repression and feminist resistance.
Through narratives of survival under Bolsonaro’s far-right regime—and the disillusionment that followed the return of leftist governance—the paper discusses how state violence and neoliberal dispossession converge to racialise insecurity and inflict an emotional toll on activism at the frontlines. Simultaneously, from contested politics emerge alternative infrastructures of care, collective protection, and political education, that reimagine uses of urban space, reconfiguring the city as both a site of international harms and a terrain of insurgent solidarity.
Reading feminist testimonies as theory, the paper argues that feminist rights defenders in Brazil articulate a critical epistemology of resistance that challenges dominant security paradigms. Their reflections expose how authoritarian strategies—surveillance, militarised policing, and moral governance—are lived and contested through gendered and racialised bodies. In doing so, they expand the political imagination of what safety, justice, and democracy can mean in contexts of enduring colonial and patriarchal violence. Ultimately, their stories show how imagining feminist cities is part of a broader lived praxis of survival and resistance within a global architecture of authoritarianism.
