This seminar discusses the challenges immigrant women face in Brazil and Portugal. We aim to reflect on perceptions, in the Global North and South, of immigration from Latin America, debating the challenges and forms of agency in the face of coloniality and the colonisation of the imagination (Quijano, 1992). In this seminar, we will discuss Brazil and Portugal through the experiences of Venezuelan immigrant women in Paraíba and Brazilian women in Portugal. Using the lens of gender coloniality, the speakers will discuss the challenges faced by these women in the face of everyday and cumulative subordination and the absence of genuinely intersectional policies capable of reducing their vulnerability.

Gender coloniality and migration protection: discussing the institutional construction of the ‘vulnerable migrant woman’ in the Brazilian context

In this presentation, Fernanda Soares de Sousa offers a theoretical and conceptual reflection on the ambivalence of institutional protection for migrant women. She begins by distinguishing between the recognition of concrete vulnerabilities—essential for formulating public responses—and the construction of vulnerability as the institutional identity of these women. When taken for granted, this representation can reduce diverse individuals to the homogeneous figure of the victim in need of protection, obscuring their historicity, autonomy and political agency.
Building on this perspective, Fernanda Soares de Sousa asks: how does the interplay between María Lugones’s concept of gender coloniality and Françoise Vergès’s critique of ‘civilisational feminism’ help us understand the shift from recognising specific vulnerabilities to the institutional construction of the ‘vulnerable migrant woman’?

Word Disorder: Writing, Publishing, Immigration and Resistance

The public sphere, as Rita Felski and Nancy Fraser have clearly demonstrated, has never been a neutral space. Rather, it is a contested terrain shaped by unequal power relations, where what becomes sayable and legitimate is constantly contested. In this sense, amid the rise of the far right and its anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic discourses in various countries, it is important to question how counter-publics capable of opposition are constituted and strengthened.

In this vein, Monise Martinez proposes considering writing, editing and publishing as practices of counter-publicity – practices through which voices that are routinely silenced, such as those of women, racialised people and immigrants, can reclaim their own narratives about their political subjectivities and needs. To this end, she draws on her situated position as a writer and editor to revisit projects and publications she has collaborated on in Portugal, as an immigrant, considering these experiences as concrete practices of resistance and symbolic contestation.

Commentary: Luciane Lucas dos Santos, CES reseacrher
 

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