Dissident Practices

Dissident Practices examines sixty years of visual art by 18 prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present. Through their radical sociopolitical agendas, they affirmed their differences and produced diversity in a society where women remain targets of brutality and discrimination. Dissident Practices spans the years from the military dictatorship in the mid-1960s to the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, the social changes of the 2000s, the rise of the Right in the late 2010s, and the recent development of a more diverse younger generation fighting for gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights.

One of the most intriguing arguments of the book is that many women artists who lived under the Brazilian military regime, which lasted from 1964 until 1985, rejected the term feminism because they viewed it as a North American import. The feminist movement was considered one more hegemonic enterprise orchestrated by the United States. Thus, the choice of these artists not to claim it became part of an anti-imperialist gesture.

There was no Brazilian equivalent to Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, since many female artists had a prominent role in the visual arts in the country. Though they were lauded as key figures in Brazilian art and enjoyed a unique position in terms of visibility, these artists still faced adversity and constraints because of their gender. While many of them disavowed the term ‘feminism,’ they still employed feminist strategies without naming it as such or by finding a better term to define their practices. At the time, political resistance to the dictatorship was the order of the day, and any other issue was considered a distraction; nothing should divide one’s attention. Thus, gender related discussions took a back seat to more pressing matters.