Carla Preciosa Braga Cerqueira

VII. Our place in history: Young feminists at the margins

Feminisms in Portugal, as elsewhere, have been shaped historically. From the revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which ended monarchy and established a republican system, women have taken a stand. In the late 1970s, after 48 years of dictatorship during which feminist issues were effectively silenced, feminist groups began to appear in Portugal. It was then, in 1976, that UMAR (Uniao de Mulheres Alternativa e Resposta [‘Union of Women for Alternatives and Answers’]) began its fight against discrimination and violence against women. While the issues that UMAR addressed were relevant throughout the country, their initiatives did not always reach all of the regions of Portugal. In 2008, with the intention of overcoming this deficiency, as well as engaging with contemporary debates on feminism, we joined a group of young women to create an UMAR regional core in Braga, in the north of Portugal. In a clearly conservative region, our group stood out; creating unique dynamics that nevertheless echoed with the historical memory of earlier feminists. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to

“Challenging it softly”: a feminist inquiry into gender in the news media context

This work was supported by the European Fund for Regional Development (FEDER) through the Operational Competitiveness Programme (COMPETE), and by national funds through the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the project PTDC/CCI-COM/114182/2009.