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The social role of women in Brazil is subject to significant change in both capacity and scope. While women constitute the majority of the population in Brazil, they account for 40 per cent of the workforce, and thus, they remain comparatively invisible in public life. This is evident in political representation, as although Brazilian law stipulates that political parties must reserve at least 30 per cent of their nominations for women for legislative elections, this does not occur in reality. Furthermore, despite Afro-descendant Brazilians constituting the majority of the population, in the Chamber of Deputies, for instance, there are only 9 per cent Afro-descendant representatives. Therefore, this study focuses on understanding issues of political representation of Afro-descendant women in political spaces in Brazil – a country where politics is still predominantly white and male. Thus, despite a rhetorical position of an ‘open country’ with opportunities for all, the whiteness and masculinity of Brazilian politics illustrates the degree of mythology concerning the rhetoric of Brazil’s racial democracy. We employ a qualitative research approach in this study and we employ an oral-history-informed post-structuralist approach. We focus our empirical analysis on in-depth interviews with an Afro-descendant female accounting professor who was elected to an important political position. We argue that discussions about democracy in Brazil go beyond formal aspects of civil rights, as our study highlights the necessity of reshaping political processes to engender greater female and Afro-descendent participation, to engender both groups to seek political careers as well as to encourage political parties to include more female and more Afro-descendent candidates. The ultimate goal of such institutional reform is a reformation of ‘racial democracy’ as Afro-descendent women interact with, stand and succeed in Brazilian elections.

At one end, family farming is seen as important for incentivizing local ­development. At another end, the Brazilian National School Feeding Program (PNAE) is a social assistance policy that provides food and nutrition for students enrolled in public schools. In 2015, the program fed 41.5 million students across the country. In 2009, these two worlds – family farming and school feeding – were connected through a public policy implemented by law. This law defines that 30% of the financial resources for the acquisition of school feeding, transferred by the federal government to states and municipalities, must be spent on items produced by family farming. However, even considering the legal requirement and many of the changes it has brought, many municipalities still do not meet this minimum requirement. In 2015, more than half of the 5,570 Brazilian municipalities, about 54%, did not reach the 30% minimum; that is, over 3,000 municipalities failed to meet that legal threshold. This context raises some questions: Why is the law not effective? What are the social structures that hinder the implementation of this public policy as it was conceived? One of the theoretical frameworks that could sustain such questioning is Structuration Theory (ST; Giddens, 2003). It brings the concept of structure duality, stating that there is no prevalence between social structure and human action, but rather a reciprocity. In this theory, the structure can be distinguished into three dimensions (signification, domination, and legitimation) and the interaction of these dimensions can lead to either transformation or continuity. Using the lenses of ST, our aim is to identify, analyze, and understand the reverberations of this public policy on social practices and how these reverberations could explain this state of things. For this, we conducted a preliminary field research, based on interviews with key agents involved in the school feeding program in a municipality in the Midwest of Brazil. The preliminary results revealed that the change induced by the law reflected on those agents, altering social practices. New procedures were adopted that transformed social practices pertaining to the dimension of signification. Nevertheless, challenges related to logistics (transport and storage), trust, training, and bureaucracy are still hindering the effectiveness of the intended public policy. As a limitation, we were not under conditions to grasp the changes while they occurred because our point of attention is the scenario after the enforcement of the relevant Law. Beyond that, our study uses ST to deal with the resistance of social structures to change even in a scenario of mandatory law enforcement.