Drums of Safo and the Ceará Women’s Forum – FCM

The initiative will carry out training sessions and self-education, spreading information and supporting the struggle and access to rights of populations harmed by the 2014 World Cup. The main themes are: the situation of black women and the LGBT population in the outskirts of Fortaleza, especially black transvestites, transsexuals and lesbians, along with the strengthening of coordination efforts among other organizations and movements. To that end, different idioms will be constructed: popular feminist education, written production and street art.

– A cycle of training on the World Cup and Rights Violations;

– Creation of an informative pamphlet in support of populations made more vulnerable by the World Cup: rights attained and guarantee mechanisms, including the rights to protest and ways of protecting oneself from violent repression and seek out rights relevant to this issue;

– Organizing street art events with a focus on Street Theater and Black Feminist Drumming. These actions aim at dialogue with society on the issues at hand during this project.

There have been countless denunciations and reports of rights violations caused by efforts related to the 2014 World Cup: forced removals, embezzlement, overcharging by government contractors, privileged access for the private sector and the authoritarianism of FIFA along with politicians and national markets; militarist interventions to repress and ethnically cleanse certain areas. Focused on entertaining the masculine population, the World Cup mobilizes the football market, commercializes women and girls as sexual and tourist attractions and requires extreme interventions in urban areas to sustain it. However, despite so many denunciations and protests, there is still little visibility of the impacts and risks it causes to women’s lives, especially black women in poorer outlying urban areas and those belonging to social groups that ought to “participate” in the World Cup through the sex trade, especially poor black women, girls and transvestites. It is estimated that due to the World Cup, thousands of girls and women will be victimized through sexual exploitation, domestic human trafficking for sexual exploitation and sexual tourism, while the topic doesn’t receive the attention it deserves on the part of the public authorities at different levels of government.

Drums of Safo is a musical group who tries to spread feminist thinking through art, as well as spread Afro-brazilian culture and that of the LGBT population. The FCM is a feminist political organization that mobilizes collective actions on behalf of women’s rights and for the end to oppression and discrimination. The two organizations have come together to strengthen women’s struggles for their rights.

The organizations are part of the Brazilian Women’s Network.

The project helped to strengthen the feminist debate among urban movements that denounced rights violations during the 2014 World Cup. Following the World Cup, facing the resurgence of conservative discourse and practices as well as of pressure against human rights and its popular achievements, the project changed approach and focused on black women’s issues and rights to the city. Women’s mobilizations dealt with the necessity of maintaining dialog between black women about rights violations and racism, as well as the possibilities to do so. More meetings and processes were held, at shorter intervals, with groups of women who fought rights violations during the World Cup and women afflicted on a daily basis by the denial of their rights to the city, such as terreiro women (women of religions of African origin), black lesbians, bicyclists and youth movements.