Can feminism belong to the state? Reflections on State Feminism and Feminist Institutionalism

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the links between feminist movements and women's policy agencies in post-dictatorship Argentina, Brazil and Chile. It focuses on the concept of state feminism, commonly defined as the study of "the connection between women's movements, women's policy agencies and the state within a particular conceptual relation" (Scheidegger 2014). The most common notions, which have been widely employed in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, are nowadays considered outdated and not appropriate to other contexts. In Latin America, "state feminism" is not a popular term, since most studies on the subject focus on post-industrial democracies, as exemplified by the most solid project on the theme: Research Network on Gender Politics and the State - RNGS. This research seeks to question the State Feminism traditional agenda, expanding its conceptual-methodological framework, aiming to answer the following question: can feminism belong to the state? This project deepens the analysis made in the first two years of post-doctoral studies.