Feminist hope

Debora Diniz and Ivone Gebara – two leading figures in Brazilian feminism – meet to reflect on feminist hope.

In Feminist Hope , Debora Diniz and Ivone Gebara – two of the main voices of Brazilian feminism – meet to think about feminist action based on twelve political and poetic verbs.

A university professor, Debora Diniz is widely known for her work to guarantee women's sexual and reproductive rights, including the decriminalization of abortion. Due to the backlash from extremists against her work, she was forced into self-exile in 2018. She has received over one hundred awards, including the prestigious Dan David Award for her academic work on gender equality, and was named one of the 100 Global Thinkers of 2016 by the renowned magazine Foreign Policy.

Ivone Gebara is an ecofeminist Catholic nun who, due to her critical theology—and continues to practice it—and her stance on the decriminalization of abortion, was banned by the Vatican for several years from speaking in public and sharing her ideas. Her focus on values such as women's autonomy and freedom, which are traditionally denied by the Catholic Church, makes her an inspiration for feminist groups such as the important Catholics for the Right to Decide.

In common, the authors bring the strangeness of a naturalized patriarchal conjugation, the celebration of feminist joy and a life of creative disobedience to the patriarchy and its plots.

"Those who read Feminist Hope realize how necessary it is for the feminist intellectual project to create ethical, loving, and complicit approaches between us. The identity of feminism can be capable of reaffirming a dissonant point of view against the extermination of human rights, the hijacking of our authorship, and inclined to the repositioning of our identity." – From the blurb, by Carla Akotirene