Bitches Unleashed

Moreira turns to Brazilian favela funk, a scene where funkeiras, marginalized women and transfeminine artists of color perform femininities that cross conventional boundaries. Her central interest is embodied politics, the way the body is used in everyday acts of resistance, and how this idea has been shaped mainly by white feminist scholarship in the West.

The author argues that debates about agency and social change drawn from white Western women are often applied to other groups as if they were universal, and that studies of femininity tend to treat the oppression of white women as the global norm. Taking a transnational view, she examines whether embodied performance can disrupt the white, classist, heteropatriarchal structures that weigh most heavily on poor women and transfeminine people of color in Brazil.

The book has three aims. It challenges the theoretical weaknesses of white feminist accounts of embodied politics and offers a transfeminista alternative. It shows how traditional research methods have limited understanding of women and people of color and of their performances. It also adds to the still-developing field of critical intercultural communication, where research on bodies and performance, particularly among marginalized people in global contexts, remains limited.