Patricia’s comment about the strength of women in Maré is partly echoed by the Brazilian women in London who find solidarity through working together. While Luisa emphasises the need to survive as a form of resistance and the need to resist as a form of survival, Dayana acknowledges the need to be a ‘warrior’ to cope with living in London, yet she is always hopeful, demonstrated in how she visualises the city as a Ferris wheel. All these processes allow women to face the multiple forms of gendered urban violence they encounter on a daily basis. Yet, there are also differences between the two locations in that the dynamics within the bordered territory of Maré facilitate and encourage resilience and resistance in powerful ways (Sousa Silva and Heritage, 2021). Engendering such resistance is more difficult among the dispersed population of Brazilian women in London. These differences reinforce the importance of a translocational approach that allows for foregrounding the local experiences of gendered urban violence and resistance while also capturing the resonances across borders and boundaries.

This chapter addresses the nature of resistance as another key dimension of the translocational gendered urban violence framework outlined in Chapter 1. Throughout the book, we have highlighted how women in Maré and London have developed agency in the face of their ‘painful’ experiences of violence. Their stories have not just been focused on suffering but also on hope and resistance, reflecting wider Latin American translocational feminist alliances that have questioned the power structures that underlie gendered violence (Alvarez et al., 2014; Félix de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022; Gago, 2020). This chapter specifically explores the coping, negotiation and resistance practices they have devised. We show how, just as gendered urban violence is multidimensional and multiscalar, so too is resistance. Resistance spans across borders transnationally through bodies and through cities. Its practices can be individual and collective, reactive and active, can range from ‘small acts’ of defiance to activism and protest and address the immediate effects of violence and its structural underpinnings (McIlwaine et al., 2022c). Resistance can also be constructed through the arts in creative ways (McIlwaine et al., 2022a, 2022d).

Acknowledging the multiple and innovative forms of resistance developed by women, we show that they are integral to our translocational approach, forming the foundations for the feminist politics of translation that can contribute to the transformation of women’s lives in the face of adversity. While it is vital to recognise these resistance practices as potentially transformative in women’s lives, it is important not to romanticise them, as hinted at by Luisa above, who emphasises the survival imperative. It is also crucial to acknowledge that women are not responsible for preventing male violence and other forms of structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. Nevertheless, women are key protagonists in addressing it and in developing innovative practices.

Resistance practices are therefore central to how women negotiate the violence across private and public spheres as they claim their rights to the city locally as well as transnationally. With specific reference to resistance in Maré, this chapter also discusses how ‘emotional-political communities’ have been built during the COVID-19 crisis, emphasising mutual support and activism (McIlwaine et al., 2023a). Due to the nature of the underlying research where the second project focused specifically on resistance in Maré as well as the dynamics of the territory itself, this chapter places more emphasis on this case than London (see Chapter 2).

Resistance practices for challenging gendered urban violence

Here, we examine these ‘pluralities of resistance’ (Foucault, 1978: 95) based on ‘actions taken to counter or reduce violence’ which may include specific acts, moments or interventions (Pain, 2014: 136). As suggested above, resistance practices are multiple in relation to their degree of formality, whether they are covert or hidden, organised or disorganised, and are often viewed along a continuum (de Heredia, 2017). An everyday perspective emphasises the unconscious nature of resistance and how intersectional power relations are deeply embedded within how practices are created (hooks, 1990; Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016; Scott, 1985). Nonetheless, resistance practices are spatially and temporally heterogenous acts that challenge power and domination on an individual or collective basis through multiple ‘repertoires of everyday resistance’. We use the term ‘practices’ here rather than strategies to emphasise the actions of the subjugated that may be reactive rather than organised, but which have the potential to transform people’s lives (see also Datta et al., 2007; Gill et al., 2014). In Brazil, resistance to intersectional sexism and racism has been enacted and analysed for decades by Black feminist scholars such as Beatriz Nascimento (2021), although this is only now beginning to be recognised on a larger anglophone stage (Smith et al., 2021).

While the work of these scholars has focused on addressing various types of epistemic violence, there is also a large body of work on resistance to gender-based violence. Rajah and Osborn (2022) identify two aspects of this work in relation to intimate partner violence: first, the acceptance and validity of domination are never complete and can be confronted, and second, there is bountiful scholarship on individual and collective resistance (also Osborn and Rajah, 2022). It is also important to note that identifying individual resistance can be difficult and that a ‘coherent’ political subject may not be possible (Hughes, 2022). Yet, this should not underplay the significance of ‘small acts’ (Pain, 2014) of resistance or ‘quiet politics’ (Askins, 2018), which can entail a range of practices that might not appear to be agentic, such as leaving an abusive partner, compared with other resistance practices which address structural conditions.

In the context of endemic urban violence, poverty and fear, a range of conceptualisations have been developed to capture how women deal with direct and indirect gendered violence. Many of these draw on the commonly evoked distinction made by Cindi Katz (2004), who identifies three ways in which women respond to such violence: resistance, referring to a direct challenge to hegemonic power structures; reworking, involving reorganising practices of power or addressing structural inequalities; and resilience, involving surviving within existing constructions of domination. Specific examples include Hume and Wilding (2020), who develop a ‘situated politics of women’s agency’ addressing their management of threats and their forging of formal and informal safe spaces in Brazil and El Salvador, and Jokela-Pansini (2020) who discusses strategies of ‘self-care’ among feminist activists in Honduras through solidarity, movement building and wellbeing (McIlwaine et al., 2022c for a summary). These conceptualisations draw in various ways on Latin American/ist scholars who have been at the forefront of thinking, activism and protest which challenge the racialised state violence that has plagued Brazil and other Latin American countries (Félix de Souza and Rodrigues-Selis, 2022; McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022; also the introduction and Chapter 1).

Research with migrants has shown how they resist violence, which is often perpetrated by the state and/or as a form of ‘border violence’ (Lopes Heimer, 2023). Again, a range of conceptualisations aim to capture how migrants resist state violence, such as Brambilla and Jones’s (2020) notion of borders as ‘sites of generative struggles’, Conlon’s (2013) ‘counter conduct’ with regards to hunger strikes among asylum seekers and Saunders and Al-Om’s (2022) concept of ‘slow resistance’ to the UK asylum system, among others (Pain and Cahill, 2022). Some specifically address gender, such as Piedalue’s (2022) ‘slow non-violence’ in relation to migrants in the US and India (also Piedalue, 2017) and Ryburn’s (2021) discussion of ‘aguantar’ (to endure) among migrants in Chile.

Aiming to raise awareness and generate resistance is also vital to our ‘creative translation pathways’ that include curatorial or co-produced and participatory approaches to working with survivors and artists (Chapter 2). These creative encounters are underpinned by resistance to hegemonic discourses around women survivors as passive, stigmatised and victimised and often entail the encouragement of women to claim their rights and to build dignity following Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methods aiming to engender social transformation. Validating the art created by those living on the margins has been a crucial form of creative resistance (Heritage, 2018a; Kaptani et al., 2021; McIlwaine et al., 2022a, 2022d).

In this chapter, we adapt the typology developed in relation to Maré which stretches across a spectrum – from coping practices responding to the immediate effects of gendered urban violence to those which enable structural gendered transformations in women’s urban and transnational lives (McIlwaine et al., 2022c). We differentiate between everyday reactive practices in the short term and transformative structuring resistance actions in the medium and long term, all of which can be individual and collective, formal and informal. The practices are non-linear and reflect responses to different types of gendered urban violence at different moments and structural contexts, as well as incorporating resistance through creativity. They are interwoven and produce threshold zones, or liminal zones of indeterminacy, which reflect blurring between types of practices (McIlwaine et al., 2022a, 2022c, 2022d; McIlwaine et al., 2023b). At the core of many practices are collective memory-making and transgenerational and transnational community knowledge production among women, key to the construction of dignity.

Short-term resistance practices to address gendered urban violence in Maré

At the outset, it is important to note that women have been at the locus of articulated social struggles in Maré throughout its history. Women had prominent roles in neighbourhood associations (particularly in the favela of Nova Holanda) and in lobbying for improvements around housing tenure, basic services and public security (Sousa Silva, 2015; Sousa Silva and Heritage, 2021). They have also been on the frontlines of resistance to state violence and neglect and in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic (McIlwaine et al., 2023a). As Luisa notes in the introduction to this chapter, resistance, together with survival, is fundamental to women’s lives in Maré. As Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have shown, women face multiple forms of gendered urban violence that they deal with in various ways (McIlwaine et al., 2022c, Table 3). Chapter 6 highlighted the ineffectiveness of reporting gender-based violence to formal sources, often leading to the intensification of violence in which women had no other option but to deal with it themselves. In the words of Maria, forty-six and parda: ‘We’re not resisting because we want to, we resist because we need to … No one chooses to live this violence’. This reflects the long-term resilience developed among residents of Maré over time, creating a powerful bedrock from which to create resistance practices. Many aspects of these processes in the short and longer term are incorporated into our geographic information system (GIS) storymap.¹

Focusing on short-term mechanisms, women frequently discussed how to respond to violence in the public sphere inside and outside Maré. Inside Maré, women developed territorial and shared knowledge about unofficial borders and internal divisions, as well as sites known to be avoided and those which are protective of women. Unsafe places were directly related to how urban violence and armed conflicts were distributed in the territory, with unofficial borders (concrete or symbolic) reflecting the territorial domains of rival armed groups (see Figure 0.1; the introduction). Women’s accounts prominently featured experiences of violence at the ‘borders’ which delimited a transition between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of Maré. These ‘borders’ included roads surrounding Maré which were considered hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, especially at night. The Military Police Battalion and the Military Police Station based in Maré were also identified as unsafe. Other borders delimited the areas occupied by armed groups, where residents’ free movement was inhibited and where there was a high risk of episodes of conflict taking place. Known as ‘divisas’ (border areas), these may be demarcated by barricades and checkpoints or through shared knowledge (see also Chapter 5; McIlwaine et al., 2023b).

When discussing resistance to violence with participants in Maré, police operations and conflicts between armed groups were the most frequent forms of violence addressed. Women recounted how they mobilised relationships, transgenerational knowledge founded in territorial experience and local cultural codes learned throughout their lives. Women were spatially aware that walking alone made them more vulnerable, and so they would walk with others, ask someone to pick them up or let someone know where they were going and when they had arrived at their destination. Fatima, a thirty-six-year-old preta transgender woman, noted that she avoided places where members of armed groups hung out in the streets: ‘If I know that there is that little group there, I avoid going by. And if I do [pass that way], I don’t even look, just to avoid problems’.

Staying at home and seeking more protected spaces within their homes during police operations were perhaps the most common set of reactive practices. Silvia, fifty-six, reflected on this: ‘When there’s an operation, I don’t leave the house. I’ll stay indoors. I lock the gate. Preferably, I don’t even go near the window, because once when I was by the window, a shot came in and almost hit me’. Reflecting transgenerational knowledge transfer, parents taught their children how to identify danger. Joseane, nineteen and of Indigenous origin, remembered how as a child she used to think that gunshots were fireworks until her father explained that they were part of the war in Maré. Women often stayed on the frontline of coping with armed and especially police violence through protecting male relatives and friends who were disproportionately targeted (see Chapter 5). Paloma, forty-seven and preta, spoke about worrying about her son, telling him to always take his ID when he goes out: ‘Because when you least expect it, the cops are already beating you up. They don’t respect the favela resident. [I’m] tense for all the time until he gets home’. Another common individual practice was using mobile phone apps and especially social networks (Facebook and WhatsApp) to obtain information about police operations.

To protect themselves, some women adopted coping mechanisms that allowed them to turn their focus inward, such as listening to music and pretending nothing was happening, to avoid feeling emotionally paralysed by police operations. Lia, thirty-five, spoke about having a ‘protective cover’ in her head which she called her ‘kinsphere’: ‘That’s the dance term. As far as my hand can reach, there is an energetic field, and my energy field is very strong’. Similarly, Vivian, twenty, said she always sensed a police operation before it happened and she tried to act calmly, listen to music and pray to God. Carrying on as normal was a common tactic, as noted by one of the field researchers, Fernanda Vieira, who reflected on a focus group which was interrupted by gunshots. While initially Fernanda felt that their dignity was being stolen, she changed her mind when she realised that the women did not stop talking when the gunshots began and that, in fact, they had built up forms of resistance to it:

This experience reflects wider collective experiences developed among women who have developed support networks to cope with home invasions, assaults and harassment perpetrated by police. Women would go to the homes of other friends and relatives to avoid being alone and more vulnerable to police violence. Patricia, thirty-one, explained: ‘When the operation hits, we hear gunshots, we immediately go to my mother’s house’. This collective protection was felt by many women, with many speaking of feeling safe inside Maré (see Chapter 5). Indeed, Joseane stated that it was like a quilombo (see also Nascimento, 2021, who makes similar arguments):² ‘Because I know that inside [Maré] there is my family, inside there are friends, inside there are welcoming spaces, whereas outside … it’s as if here was a quilombo. If anything happens to me here, I have a network to protect me’.

What lay outside of Maré was clearly different, and women used a range of individual and collective reactive tactics to deal with potential assaults and harassment in public spaces and on public transport outside of Maré. Tactics included carrying sharp instruments such as knives, scissors, nail files or pepper spray. Even if not used, they provided women with a sense of security. One woman in a focus group discussed this (as represented in Figure 7.1):

Figure 7.1Observational drawing of a focus group in Maré on ‘the pyramid of oppression’ (credit: Mila de Choch; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2022c)

The use of objects as weapons and resisting through protective practices was especially common among transgender women who had faced transphobic physical attacks. Some carried objects with them all the time such as knives, scalpels, razor blades or chains, while others looked for weapons such as pieces of wood and stones when an attack was imminent. In the body-territory mapping, all the transgender women drew weapons in their hands (see Figure 7.2). For Neide, her job as a sex worker also meant that she needed to have these weapons to protect her from potentially violent clients. Luisa, a thirty-eight-year-old trans woman, explained what she drew on her map: ‘Knife, stiletto … when we don’t have [a weapon], we take a stick, a stone, a bottle, and leave it in a little corner [for protection]’.

Figure 7.2Body-territory map by Neide (parda transgender woman living in Nova Holanda, thirty-two years old) (adapted from Lopes-Heimer et al., 2022)

Short-term spatialised resistance practices were extremely important in both individual and collective ways as women circulated through the city. These included seeking proximity with other women and sometimes preferring the company of men they knew as a form of greater protection (see Figure 7.1). Tamires, sixteen years old and preta, stated that she would take a full bus as long as there were other women on it as she felt they would protect each other. Other women spoke of avoiding men on public transport and actively choosing not to sit beside them. At night, women preferred to use private transport such as taxis and Ubers, although these could also be dangerous. This meant that women habitually shared their location with someone they knew so that that person could follow their movements.

Some tactics were deeply embodied; some women altered their appearance or behaviour when circulating beyond Maré. Nineteen-year-old Rita, who was preta, explained how she made ‘an ugly face’ in order to ‘drive away people who could do something’ to her, while Celine, thirty-five and also preta, said that she ‘dressed well’ in order to avoid harassment. Other women used silence as a tactic in an attempt to make themselves more ‘invisible’, as noted by a woman in a focus group: ‘If I’m afraid, I just shut myself up because I know if I talk it will create problems. This protects me; I know it’s bad, that we can’t reduce ourselves like that, but it’s a resource’.

Many women identified the need to assert their identity as racialised favela residents as a form of resistance. While this was usually a long-term collective tactic, it could also be short term and individual in that women spoke of using it in response to racial stigma incidents. Joseane explained that when she goes to another territory, she always states: ‘I am favelada from Maré … implying: “Oh, I know who I am, so don’t mess with me because I’m sure of where I came from’. Similarly, Iolanda, twenty-seven and preta, said: ‘I’ve never hidden my origin of being Black, poor, from a favela. Wherever I go, I say I live in Maré. And that’s it; we have to own it’ (see also below).

Medium- and long-term resistance practices to address gendered urban violence in Maré

The divisions between short-, medium- and long-term practices of coping with and resisting gendered urban violence are blurred; what might begin as a short-term mechanism may evolve into a medium- or long-term form of resistance to private and public violence. This was certainly the case in relation to the development of support networks among family, friends and neighbours and creating collective and organisational spaces through civil society or the church, as well as using the body as resistance. Many aspects of these practices were also oriented towards prevention and creative practices.

While not addressing the fundamental causes of gendered violence, one key set of mechanisms that women spoke about entailed returning to education and establishing financial autonomy. Most women identified financial dependence as the major reason for remaining in abusive relationships, linked with the social expectation for them to care for their family, including that they would interrupt their studies or work after marriage and/or divorce and separation. Cátia, twenty-nine, said that she had been working since she was thirteen and most recently as a manicurist with her own business, because she saw her father being physically abusive to her mother and did not want to end up in the same situation. Many women such as Cátia established their own businesses because of the challenges of gendered, racialised and area-based discrimination in trying to enter the labour market beyond Maré. The route to financial autonomy was often through education, with several women returning to their studies. Thabata, twenty-nine, spoke about her struggles as a young mother when she was sixteen, leading her to drop out of school. She completed her studies in an adult education programme in 2017 and entered university in 2018: ‘It’s an achievement, a dream, to be able to look at my daughter and say, “You can do it, go and study, because [if] I succeeded, why wouldn’t you?” And to be able to give her dignity’ (see Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3Observational drawing of a focus group in Maré on ‘we have the right to take care of ourselves; we already take care of everyone else’ (credit: Mila de Choch; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2022c)

Women produced practices to resist violence through their relationships with their bodies. For some, this meant specifically using their bodies as a form of self-defence and taking classes to learn how to protect themselves. Bianca, twenty-seven, practised jiu-jitsu as a self-defence practice: ‘My strategy is to fight … That’s my bodily strategy … It’s with the hands and with the feet’. In the body-mapping, many women identified inner power embodied in their hearts, chests and minds. For example, Neide placed her family in her heart as her source of resilience, explaining how their love gave her strength in the face of violence, especially in her sex work (Figure 7.2). Lívia, thirty-six, preta and lesbian, marked the solar plexus in the centre of her chest as where her strength was located:

Many women developed forms of self-care as resistance (following Lorde, 1988) such as practising sports and maintaining healthy bodies (through walking, cycling, dance and yoga classes) and skin, nails and hair care (see Figure 7.3). Lívia, thirty-six and preta, spoke of caring for her body through taking a regular sitz bath with barbatimão (a native Brazilian tree traditionally used for medicinal purposes) to improve her gynaecological health as well as the daily stress that she felt in her vagina: ‘The sitz bath has been a place to look at myself … at my people, have the feeling of warmth, of welcome and this gives … relief, kind of takes away, relaxes a little, the violence’. She saw this as both individual and collective because it was a traditional practice that connected her with her ancestors and with nature (see below). Lívia also spoke of how exercise and teaching dance were important for her as they signified the transmission of knowledge. She identified this as a collective practice which she located in her hair, a part of her body she felt was expressive of her personality and her identity as a Black woman.

Self-care and healing had long-term benefits for women and often entailed body–nature practices, suggesting a continuum between body and nature. In the body-territory mapping, many women spoke of needing to connect with nature, a source of strength from them and a means to heal their bodies. For example, Lívia drew the sun and the sea in the area just outside of her body ‘because they are two maximum powers of strength for me. And where I can get energy from … silence, meditation, crying and smiling, looking at the sea, dancing and doing therapy; I think these strategies are fundamental for me’. Similarly, Katia located the sea within her heart, noting it as her ‘first refuge’ and that going to the beach was a healing practice. She also spoke of seeing her body and nature as one and that this was therapeutic, reflecting the notion of body–territory within Indigenous cosmologies of community feminism (Cabnal, 2010).

These practices fed into collective support networks that women develop as part of wider processes of transgenerational knowledge co-production. Angela, twenty-five and parda, noted that her extended family grounded her: ‘I have five mothers: my grandmother, my godmother, my mother, my stepmother, because she does everything for me, and the great-grandmother of the father of my daughters who helps me in everything’. Similarly, Lia, thirty-five and preta, reflected on how all her sources of support were women: ‘My aunt, my other aunt, my grandmother, then my cousin here, my cousin upstairs, who’s a single mother with four kids. My Aunt Denise, too, who’s a single mum … This place protects us or attempts to protect us’. Through these networks, women protect others in situations of domestic violence, care for each other’s children and form a collective with which to share past experiences of violence, documenting knowledge in creating family histories.

A key aspect of collective support was the power of ancestry as resistance, which emerged as especially strong for women who identified as preta in Maré. Younger women spoke of how valuing ancestry and historical belonging in Maré helped them to construct new meanings for life, new community histories and the development of resistance. For example, a group of young researchers organised by Redes da Maré and linked to the Women of the World (WOW) Festival built an independent collective called Maré de Nós (Maré in Us). This group conducted research on their ancestry, with each member developing their own initiatives. Joseane, who is part of Maré de Nós with five others, spoke about her project called By Her Eyes: ‘This project talks about the trajectory of a favela girl, the experience of an Indigenous girl in a favela territory, about ancestry, about race, class and gender, as a [way of] sharing experiences’. For her project, Tamires developed a salon business styling curly Black hair, which she felt linked her with her ancestors: ‘I decided to tell the story of hairstyles, which is based on ethnic-racial groups from the past … sometimes my grandmother used to make me coquinhos [buns]. Somehow, she was taking care of my hair and also taking care of me’.

In the body-territory workshops, Lívia wrote on her feet the phrase ‘nossos passos vem de longe’ (‘our steps come from far away’) in reference to Black feminism in Brazil (see Werneck, 2010). The aim was to show how she embodied power and strength that was rooted in collective and ancestral resistance of women like her:

This leads on to how participation in collective spaces can be a basis for resistance and solidarity. Organisations such as Redes da Maré and Casa das Mulheres run a range of projects to address gender-based violence in the absence of public service provision. In our Women Resisting Violence (WRV) podcast, Casa das Milheres’ coordinator Julia Leal speaks about the importance of the organisation’s integrated approach, which includes an obligatory group course on Gender Studies addressing gender, sexuality, race, body and territory:

Organisations in Maré therefore encourage women to understand and confront gendered urban violence and deep-seated racism as well as developing collective self-care (see Figure 7.3). Ingrid, forty-nine, spoke of how Casa das Mulheres changed her perspective: ‘It opened my eyes to a lot of things, things that I didn’t know, [like] what harassment really was … And also racism … [it] helped me in my growth’. At Casa das Mulheres, women can access professional training, legal advice, adult education, entrepreneurship and support groups. Speaking on our WRV podcast, Michele Gandra, a beneficiary of the cooperative cooking project Maré de Sabores, commented:

Therefore, informal collectives of women emerge within formal organisations, as also noted by a member of the campaign Maré Says No to Coronavirus when talking about the women in Maré de Sabores: ‘The dynamics of the kitchen means that women support each other, and they tell their life stories there … a network is formed … This collective experience … makes them stronger’. Casa das Mulheres aims to address the entire spectrum of women’s intersectional experiences and needs. They’ve expanded their work with trans women, with Black women and renovated their building to make it accessible for disabled women. Two trans women in the body-territory mapping, Fatima and Luisa, drew organisations such as Redes de Maré, Casa das Mulheres and Conexão G (which promotes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and others (LGBTQI+) affirmation actions in favelas) on their maps. Religious spaces also provided support for some women to deal with vulnerability and violence through the provision of support, refuge and food baskets. Laura, twenty-eight, found strength in the church: ‘I like to call it a community of faith … it has been a fortress, it is people who are with me in joy, in sadness, at a funeral’. Yet, the church was also ambivalent, especially the evangelical church, with some women – including several lesbian women and parda women – noting that it could be exclusionary (see Chapter 5).

Creative resistance through the arts in Maré

Women from Maré have developed a major set of long-term practices involving creative resistance through the arts and memory-making. This theme was explored through the digital storytelling project with the Museu da Pessoa using social memory technology (Worcman and Garde-Hansen, 2016; see also Chapter 2). As part of this process, the group viewed art as a means of aesthetically appropriating the world and developing creative strategies to address gendered urban violence both individually and collectively. Practices included composing and singing songs, creating samba processions, dancing, playing instruments, acting and producing plays, designing and creating clothing, doing hair and make-up and creating poetry.

Art was viewed as resistance by the women in the Female Lives project as part of their struggles for social transformation. It allowed them to develop new paths of existence, new forms of work, subsistence and financial autonomy, to break abusive relationships and form new networks and collectives. Their artistic expressions made it possible for them to deal with painful experiences, to mourn, to confront prejudice experienced both structurally and in specific situations (McIlwaine et al., 2022a). Lenice Silva Viegas, who was a dancer and founder of the Balle Transforma project as well as a student of dance at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, spoke of learning classical ballet as a child. She noted that ‘It was through pain that ballet came into my life’. With her mother’s divorce and subsequent depression, Lenice’s sister enrolled her in a ballet class. Lenice won several scholarships but also suffered considerable racial and class discrimination in dance schools outside Maré (see also Luana’s similar experiences in McIlwaine et al., 2022a: 28). She began to work as a teacher and recalled how, while working at Ballet Manguinhos (a community-led and charitably funded dance school in neighbouring favela complex Manguinhos), they had their dance space invaded by the police and had to take refuge in the bathroom during shoot-outs. In 2017, she set up her own project, Balle Transforma, and started her dance degree. She noted: ‘Today we have already helped more than 150 students from Maré. In the beginning of the project, I learned and met a new Lenice, a braver woman and a woman who could go beyond’ (see Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4Lenice Silva Viegas speaking about her life in Maré as part of the Female Lives Exhibition by the Museum of the Person (credit: Paula Santos; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2022b)

Women in the Female Lives project spoke about the power of art as a tool for confronting the historical oblivion which Black people are subjected to, together with the erasure of their memories and those of their families. Their artistic work builds bridges with their ancestry, allowing them to reformulate their stories and the stories of the community where they live (see also above). For example, Juliana Oliveira Junqueira de Aguiar is a violinist and teaches music at the Maré do Amanhã Orchestra project and in public schools in Maré. Juliana spoke about her journey to becoming a violinist and teacher and linked it with her search for her origins, her ancestry:

Many of the women in the project spoke of their desire to reclaim their ancestry and their identity as favela residents. Beatriz Virgínia Gomes Belmiro, a slam singer and poet, a member of the collective Buzina de Artistas Periféricos (Horns from the Peripheries) and a teacher at CEASM, was keen to use her art to reclaim her history and her identity.³ Beatriz said that slam allowed her to rewrite her and her grandmother’s story:

Within the stories collected in this project, social initiatives offered by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Maré emerged as critically important for inspiring women’s interest, their creative seeds and their political engagement. Indeed, Beatriz recalled that it was on entering CEASM that she learned to use art as a power, realising her place as a woman from the favela with northeastern heritage: ‘I learnt what the favela is, why I don’t have to be ashamed to speak the word favela, why I have to reclaim the history of the favela’. These women’s art therefore speaks of the potencies of Maré, producing powerful new perceptions of the community. For example, Jaqueline Souza de Andrade, who was a member of the community theatre project Cia Marginal and a social worker at the Centre for the Promotion of LGBTQI+ Citizenship in Maré, spoke about their first show, which was a homage to one of Maré’s favelas, Nova Holanda: ‘So how does this territory speak to us? This is a place completely isolated to people beyond Maré … Here, there are a lot of people; here, there is a lot of life; Maré has a lot of life’.

The digital storytelling experience therefore revealed a direct relationship between artistic engagements and dealing with difficult and violent situations. One woman composed a song after a difficult separation; another got involved with a samba school in Maré after the rupture of a relationship marked by domestic violence; another searched for arts-based social projects to help deal with the absence of parents at home; another turned to music in school to avoid bullying and racism; and another dealt with financial vulnerability through artistic labour (McIlwaine et al., 2022a).

While this work was deeply embedded within the territory of Maré, SCAR by Bia Lessa, on the other hand, entailed bringing a dynamic curation of the stories of women survivors in Maré to London audiences. Encounters within this project were both local and transnational in nature and reflected an emergent translocational feminist sensibility that developed across borders. This was reflected in the audience’s responses. One Brazilian audience member found it extraordinary that she had to come to London to hear these stories. Many dimensions of SCAR resisted violence through raising awareness of the situation of women in Maré. One Brazilian audience member reflected on racialised structural violence back home: ‘I am from the middle class but when I go back, my dad’s family, they have a maid … Well, in many ways there is still slavery in Brazil, maids are Black and often treated like slaves’ (Tiller, 2018: 12–13). While the audiences in London reacted with shock and sadness to the painful stories of violence, they expressed gratitude at the opportunity to engage with them: ‘it’s so important to give these women a voice, support and belief where they have had none before’ (Tiller, 2018: 12). Resistance through empathy and solidarity emerged strongly in the audience responses: ‘Dear women, how you’ve planted love, strength, hope and pride in all our hearts. We are one and will grow together. A London girl’. Another man who visited the installation spoke of the ‘forcefulness of bringing the stories together’ making the piece finally ‘uplifting’ (Tiller, 2018: 13). This was echoed by Chrissie Tiller, who reflected (2018: 9): ‘For many, the power of the piece and its ultimate hopefulness and optimism lay in the way in which the images and the words worked together and the way the artist immersed us in these stories’. One of the Brazilian women included in the piece and who visited London to see it spoke of resistance through representation: ‘It speaks about the beauty and community that has given us strength. The human spirit that deserves to be seen’ (Tiller, 2018: 14). Overall, SCAR was able to communicate painful stories replete with power, dignity and the ability to resist the violence of women’s lives. It was a transnational creative engagement that engendered resistance across borders and was ultimately transformational.

Similarly, when Gaël Le Cornec performed Efêmera in Rio de Janeiro, there was an element of transnational feminist solidarity among women, with many seeking Gaël out after the play to share their experiences of class-based gender-based violence. She noted: ‘in Brazil, women would come and speak to me directly and their experiences as survivors were unbelievable. A lot of working-class women saying they had been abused by their boss or middle-class men’. Transforming Efêmera into the short film Ana and the video Raising Awareness was an explicit effort to extend this transnational and translocational feminist solidarity. This was facilitated by Ana being shown in five international film festivals; one audience member from the US screening noted: ‘Really powerful. Felt so intimately connected to the actresses. I really appreciated how it showed how domestic violence affects migrants, especially those who are undocumented’.

Resistance and coping practices to address gendered urban violence in London

While the focus of the research in London was not specifically on resistance, a range of different practices to address gendered urban violence was identified by Brazilian migrant women, including individual and collective and short- and longer-term approaches, as well as those related with civil society organisations. The Step Up Migrant Women (SUMW) campaign was focused on challenging gendered infrastructural violence, and the work with Migrants in Action (MinA) was focused on reclaiming and visibilising the experiences of Brazilian women, forms of active resistance. Overall, it is important to note that, in contrast to Maré where resistance is localised, the Brazilian population in London is dispersed through the city. This means that their resistance is channelled through these organisations, with arguably fewer practices on the ground.

The coping mechanisms identified by women in London to deal with violence in both the private and public spheres often revolved around individual women changing their behaviour, suggesting an element of victim-blaming. This theme was also prevalent in the focus group discussion with six men, mainly from São Paulo and Goiás, who lived in London. They suggested that women should defend themselves by carrying a gun, knife or pepper spray (carrying the two former weapons are criminal offences in the UK). One male participant stated that it was important ‘to encourage women to defend themselves … to encourage them to say no to violence’. However, they did identify longer-term measures such as greater awareness-raising in society and educating children and parents, male and female (see also below). Women also produced victim-blaming narratives, as shown in Figure 7.5 where a focus group suggested that women should not wear suggestive clothing and should silence their mobile phones to prevent violence in public places, among other practices.

Figure 7.5Participatory flow diagram on how to address gender-based violence; designed by three Brazilian women from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro aged thirty-two–thirty-eight (adapted from McIlwaine and Evans, 2018)

The importance of psychological support emerged as the most important short-term way of dealing with gender-based violence, identified by more than a third (35 per cent) of women in the survey (McIlwaine and Evans, 2018). As noted by a woman in one of the focus groups, such assistance has to start early – ‘because many women are so marked [by violence] that they are in no position to climb out of the pothole’ – and it has to be provided for free (as is the case in many of the organisations – see below). Ana Clara, thirty-six and originally from São Paulo, spoke about feeling as if she had been driven to madness by the abuse suffered from her husband, having already contemplated suicide, commenting that therapy was a lifesaver for her: ‘Gradually, I discovered the truth … I know that the help I get here is what is making me strong enough to keep going. If I hadn’t come here, I would have given up, I would have gone back and given up all my rights’. This type of psychological help was identified as important for survivors and for perpetrators, as suggested by Alana, thirty, originally from São Paulo:

Indeed, 44 per cent of women in the survey noted that men should be involved in longer-term measures, too, through education, the most important longer-term response. This included school-based and informal education on information and rights. Jessica, forty-one and from Minas Gerais, noted: ‘Children should be taught about different kinds of abuse, to tell them it isn’t normal for an uncle to touch you, or a grandfather to put a child on his lap … the school has to play an active role’. The importance of teaching boys was seen as integral, especially parents teaching their sons that violence is wrong, as suggested by Natalia, thirty-eight, from Goiás: ‘There are lots of people who still teach their sons that the woman is like a slave, so we need to change the way we teach our children. Not just mothers … fathers too’. In addition, 18 per cent of women in the survey suggested information could be shared through prevention campaigns, as explained by Marcia, forty-two, from Espírito Santo: ‘Like, for example, that leaflet, such a simple thing, it landed in my hands at the right time, and it made me realise the harm that was happening to me’. SCAR encouraged UK audiences to consider educational measures, with one man in the audience noting that ‘Every man needs to see this all over the world. Let’s face it’ (Tiller, 2018: 13). While individual and collective resistance is vital, wider structural change must not be forgotten (see Chapter 8).

Just as in Maré, civil society organisations in London were crucial in providing support and solidarity among Brazilian migrant women in both the short and longer term. Indeed, non-statutory migrant and women’s organisations provided safe havens for survivors (Chapter 6). These organisations provided tailored and non-judgemental support for women in their own language and in culturally sensitive ways, becoming like an alternative family for many. Speaking about the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS), Miriam, forty-six, noted:

Organisations also cultivated collective engagements among women such as mutual support groups. The LAWRS, for example, created Sin Fronteras (No Limits), a group working with young Latin American women (aged fourteen to twenty-one) on violence prevention. Using participatory activities, they focused on self-esteem, rights, education and empowerment (McIlwaine, 2022). The project coordinator, Melissa Munz, discussed how while many of the young women witnessed violence against their mothers at home, as well as violence in the street and racial discrimination, she said they were defiant through their solidarity:

Developing advocacy and campaigning is a crucial long-term initiative in resisting violence, as developed through the SUMW project. As part of their lobbying around the UK’s Domestic Abuse Bill, which became an Act in 2021, they were successful in securing two amendments around using victims’ personal data for immigration purposes (when reporting to immigration authorities, for example). However, many other propositions were denied. In our WRV podcast, Elizabeth Jiménez-Yáñez discussed their collaborative work in trying to influence the legislative process:

Creative resistance through the arts in London

A key aspect of the various artistic engagements undertaken in London was awareness-raising as a form of resistance. The curation of the research by Gaël Le Cornec into Efêmera and Ana was focused on this in terms of ensuring that a wide and non-academic audience was exposed to the ‘painful truths’ of Brazilian migrant women’s lives in London. These interpretations of the research revealed often invisible realities through different emotional registers. As noted in Chapter 2, Gaël sees her art as generating awareness and becoming a tool to pressurise for change. The audience responses to Efêmera after the Brighton performances reflected this, with one person noting: ‘This is such important research that needs to be shared and publicised. The performance made me feel hopeful that the arts can be a platform for the voices of the victims of social violence – since they are so often failed by the media and the justice system’.

Although there was some evidence of resistance through persuasion where audiences were asked to become activists (McIlwaine, 2021b, 2022; also Inchley, 2015), Efêmera focused mainly on resistance through catharsis and empathy, as with SCAR (see above). After the Brighton performance, a woman who identified as a survivor raised the issue of coping with memories of violence through confronting them: ‘It is our duty to expose, protect, heal and promote awareness. Thank you, Gaël, for doing your part’. After the London shows, women felt compelled to speak to Gaël. She recalled in an interview how ‘there were people in tears outside the theatre that I had to hug and calm down’ (see Chapter 2).⁴

Gaël’s creative variations of Efêmera (including the internationally screened short film Ana and the online video Raising Awareness) spoke to women across borders about intimate partner and structural and state violence and planted important seeds of resistance through awareness-raising. However, they did not involve survivors. In contrast, We Still Fight in the Dark with MinA explicitly worked with survivors in a co-produced way, engendering individual and collective therapeutic and resistance outcomes through engaging with a range of art forms. At the individual level, one of the participants poignantly noted her expectations of the project that she felt had been fulfilled:

The women also worked as a collective in a safe space to share the challenges they faced as migrant women in London, as shown in the poem in the introduction and stated by another participant: ‘I was hoping to bond with other women, listen to their stories, their pains and victories and celebrate that this not an easy life as an immigrant alongside Brazilian women so diverse and at the same time very similar in their challenges and struggles’.

Yet, the survivors were keen to move beyond the therapeutic towards awareness-raising, translating the data, usually only accessible within the academic sphere, for communication with public audiences through what one woman called ‘a bridge’ (see also Figure 7.6). She explained: ‘sometimes, not many people who have access to it [the data] can understand it, can actually translate it … But we took the data and are showing it to a different audience’. The participants took control over their histories and experiences and turned them into activism and art through their video installation that they then shared with the general public. One participant noted: ‘I’ve learnt how to use my image to call people to action and transform them. To see myself on the screen was very empowering; it made me proud … I’ve learnt to accept myself’. This demonstrates the transformative effect that this creative process had on their lives. Carolina Cal, the artistic director of MinA, noted that the creative process must start with ‘the women’s inner healing, individually and collectively, and only after that focus on fighting the system’. She goes on to comment on the political power of performance, showing its transformative power on a collective and political level, beyond individual healing: ‘When we perform to the wider public and show the reality that these women face, we start making the social change that is needed … by shedding light on untold stories, MinA can positively influence social campaigns, impacting the creation of laws that could benefit these women’.

Figure 7.6Visitors’ reactions to the Dignity and Resistance exhibition, London, May 2022

On a final note on creative resistance practices, Figure 7.6 shows a series of responses from those visiting the Dignity and Resistance exhibition in London in May 2022, showing the work in London and Maré (McIlwaine et al., 2022b). The comments are overlain on two body-territory maps from the work in Maré and show a range of reactions illustrating how the exhibition communicated women’s resistance. One person stated that they felt ‘inspired’, while another felt ‘loud and visible’ and another felt ‘love’ and ‘strength’.

Building resistance during the pandemic

As we have discussed at various points in the book, some of the research was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic which had devastating consequences for women in terms of the incidence of intimate partner and other forms of intra-family violence, not to mention for their basic needs. However, Brazilian women in Maré and London (and everywhere) responded by developing networks of mutual support (see McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022, for examples). In Maré, our partners Redes da Maré mobilised around the campaign Maré Says No to Coronavirus and the women-led initiative Support Network for Women in Maré (see Chapter 2). Through our interviews with participants in both these initiatives, it emerged that these collective emergency responses have led to an awakening among some women survivors. Therefore, as part of developing resistance practices to deal with the pandemic and gendered urban violence, women developed what we have termed ‘emotional-political communities’ (McIlwaine et al., 2023a). This concept draws on the work of Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno, who argued that sharing personal testimonies among survivors has the potential to generate emotional bonds that have political possibilities (Jimeno, 2010). In Maré, organising around the pandemic led to the creation of reactive and transformative ‘emotional-political communities’. The former addressed immediate crises through providing sustenance, shelter, basic information and expert advice, while the latter involved income-generating opportunities and organising around rights and justice.

Underlying this is the fact that women develop their own survival mechanisms in the face of state neglect, as noted by Luisa in the introduction to the chapter and reiterated by a coordinator at Casa das Mulheres: ‘Women in Maré create their own forms of informal resistance and resilience … precisely from this shortfall, this absence, this ineffectiveness. Women are incredibly inventive’. Over time, women spoke of developing greater autonomy, which equipped them with the tools to deal better with direct and indirect gendered violence, especially among Black women (see above). Michele Gandra from the cooperative cooking project in Casa das Mulheres discussed her journey of gendered consciousness: ‘We don’t change from outside in; we change from inside out. The seed I plant here in my home, I hope that it multiplies, among my neighbours, among my community. This is how we try to change. Change for the better’.

Artistic engagements also helped women cope during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling them to deal with the harmful effects of social isolation. In the digital storytelling, for example, Lenice spoke of establishing a make-up business through recording videos. She trained ninety women in the first year of the pandemic in putting on make-up, specialising in make-up for Black skin. Luana da Silva Bezerra, who was a dancer and dance teacher, created a video show Sobre-Viventes (Survivors) for the WOW Festival in 2020 during the pandemic: ‘It is a personal project, it is an initiative, it is my creation, it was from this place of the impossibility of existence itself, of how to manage to have the desire to move’.

In London, it was widely acknowledged that migrant women survivors were severely affected by the intensification of gender-based violence as well as even higher barriers to reporting (see Chapter 6). The pandemic also impoverished migrant women as they lost jobs and migrant organisations cut back on their services (McIlwaine, 2020a). In the MinA work carried out during the pandemic, several of the women spoke of being able to build an online community to deal with the isolation of lockdown. In turn, the in-person workshops were made even more inspiring because the women felt free. According to the observer notes for one of the sessions, ‘At the end, the group got together to eat some snacks and to take a photo. Then some of us walked towards Trafalgar Square to see the moon, which was beautiful that night. It was a very inspiring session’.

In concluding this chapter, the discussion clearly illustrates that Brazilian women in Maré and London are not passive victims of the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence. Reflecting on the transnational gendered urban violence framework, women address direct and indirect violence through resistance practices across borders and through different temporalities. They develop individual and collective short-, medium- and long-term mechanisms to cope with, negotiate and resist such violence. Some of these practices address the intricacies of women’s lives while others challenge the underlying structures embedded within structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. Integral to many of the practices is the development of networks where women can confront stigma, racism and misogyny and promote healing. Women embrace their own communities, symbolic and actual, as noted by Katia from Maré: ‘Maré is my nest; everyone’s here … my grandmother’s house … it is where I grew up. Maré is everything’. Women survivors assert their autonomy and resignify others’ narratives about them in order to bring about change, often through powerful creative activities, as noted by Carolina Cal in relation to Brazilian women in London: ‘Together and in the long term we can make some real transformation … We are not the object of research. We have a voice … Come talk to us and we’ll tell you our story. Don’t treat us like a lab mouse … As victims, we become agents of our own transformation’.