Representação política das mulheres negras no legislativo gaúcho: uma análise dos discursos parlamentares e dos projetos de lei das deputadas negras eleitas (2023–2025)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the political representation of Black women in the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul, drawing on the parliamentary speeches and bills introduced by the first three Black women elected to this legislative body between 2023 and 2025, a historic milestone reached after 187 years of the institution's existence. The problem guiding the investigation proposes to analyze how race, gender, and intersectionality are expressed in these two documentary genres and how they contribute to the construction of Black women's political representation in the state legislature. The general objective of this research is to analyze, through a comparative examination of the parliamentary speeches and bills produced by the Black women elected to the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul between 2023 and 2025, the ways in which race, gender, and intersectionality shape the political representation of Black women in the state legislature. This is qualitative research, documentary in nature and analytical in character, whose corpus, consisting of 15 parliamentary speeches and 33 bills, was delimited by means of a thematic relevance criterion subjected to fidelity verification. The analysis articulates eight categories grounded in a decolonial and intersectional framework, among them coloniality of power, coloniality of gender, intersectionality, and substantive representation, complemented by an interpretive lens aimed at identifying discursive strategies of legitimation and disqualification. The results reveal a heterogeneous pattern in how these categories manifest among the three parliamentarians, Bruna Rodrigues, Eliana Bayer, and Laura Sito, a heterogeneity that does not stem from the racial and gender condition they share, but from the political-party positioning of each one. Where this positioning is linked to the organized Black movement, the articulation between race and gender manifests densely, in both speeches and bills; where it distances itself ffom that movement, this articulation remains incipient, even in the face of public recognition of the parliamentarian's racial identity. The research concludes that the descriptive presence of Black women in parliament does not automatically translate into substantive representation of their interests, and that this conversion depends on the political-party positioning that underpins each parliamentarian's work. The study contributes to the field of the Human Sciences by systematizing, for the first time, the discursive and legislative activity of the first Black women deputies of the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul, and by refining, on the basis of situated empirical evidence, the understanding of the conditions that favor or hinder the conversion of descriptive representation into substantive representation of | historically underrepresented groups in legislative institutions.