ABSTRACT
In Latin America, feminist social movements have been active, diverse, and not always homogenous, as they struggled between social demands related to access to services and class, but also more radical demands for sexual liberty and abortion. This constitutive diversity is key to understanding how organized feminists were able to negotiate with more conservative sectors and accommodate their demands in more traditional conceptions of gender. In this chapter the authors reconstruct the political process of two fields of legal mobilization in Brazil, with comparable dynamics in the region: the first concerns the adoption of domestic and gender violence legislations; and the second, which faces more hurdles, on abortion rights. The authors argue that the ability to circumvent, negotiate, or re-signify dominant cultural representations of women, gender, and family, through continuous, and contextual framing processes, was crucial to feminist victories. The comparison shows that understanding legal mobilization demands the observation of the flow and displacements that occur between institutional strategies and informal arenas. The category of framing, by allowing for observation of the connection between systemic aspects of law and moral, religious, cultural, and scientific arguments, provides a privileged perspective to observe this transit.
