Fazer mulher, fazer lei: uma etnografia da produção de leis no Congresso Nacional Brasileiro

Abstract

This ethnography on the law-making process explores woman as a legal category through documents and public records from the Chamber of Deputies in Brasília. The thesis focuses on the running of Bill 1399 from 2003 that proposed a Statute of the Woman, which was later handed over to a Special Committee—the Special Committee of the Statute of the Woman—created in 2004 during the “Year of Woman” in the Chamber of Deputies. In order to analyse documents and public records of the Committees and bills I was following I had to widen my gaze by looking at different records of the same meetings, by attending several committees, comparing speeches in different meetings or even by connecting scenes outside of the Congress with the ones inside it. This approach made visible what I call “gaps”, found in legal documents and the law-making process. Looking at such gaps in legal documents reveal contradictions in women´s rights in Brazilian law and the multiple ways of describing woman as a legal subject, while gaps in the law-making process point to the lack of information in documents, intentional perspectives in records, and diverging descriptions of the same scenes. In this, the role of female deputies stood out, who as women could experience their own law-making process. This double and feminine position would, I argue, eclipse them as politicians and marginalize Committees and topics on woman´s issues inside Brazil´s legislative process.