The colonial heritage in the Brazilian representation in the National Congress from a gender perspective

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to demonstrate the existence of a colonial heritage in the Brazilian representation in the National Congress from a gender perspective. This colonial heritage can be demonstrated through the current power structures created based on a basic power scheme that perpetuates economic, political and cultural structures of domination founded in the colonial period and reproduced in subsequent periods such as the Empire, the Republics and the contemporary period after the 1988 Constitution. For this, it is necessary to make a time frame and revisit the possibility of female participation from the acquisition of active and passive political rights in Brazil, that is, the right to vote and be voted for, and then, from a decolonial premise, based on the coloniality of power, to highlight this colonial heritage that perpetuates a mostly male representation in power. The work is structured in three parts. Thus, in the first part of this article the idea of the basic scheme of power in Brazil is worked on, in the second a brief history of voting and the beginning of female parliamentary representation in the National Congress, and in the third it seeks to demonstrate the colonial heritage of this basic scheme of power in representation from the gender perspective. This is an exploratory study based on a qualitative methodology with a decolonial approach, using bibliographic and documentary research as its main methods.