Session 6: Rita Segato on Feminism and Democracy

This master lecture belongs to UNAM’s course “(Re)thinking Democracy in Today’s World.” Rita Segato tests democracy’s promise against the lives of people recognized as citizens only incompletely. Violence against women is not framed as a private matter that an already-established democracy might address later. It is evidence of the power relations that determine whose lives receive protection and which harms become politically legible.

Segato connects gender and race to the colonial history of citizenship. Her claim is not that all exclusions are the same; rather, an abstract universal subject can conceal who had to fit that model and who was left outside it. When feminist struggle is cast as a minority interest, issues that shape the wider distribution of authority, security and participation are pushed to the margins. Her critique of “minoritization” asks us to reconsider how the public is defined, without denying that women and racialized groups face specific forms of violence.

The discussion of rape and sexual violence also shifts attention from an isolated act to social meaning. Segato reads them as practices that can communicate power and organize relations, while shame and stigma are often displaced onto victims. Understanding violence as a social message neither removes individual responsibility nor replaces the investigation of particular cases. It makes another question possible: which hierarchies and collective permissions enable it, and why are some forms of violence normalized or treated as less serious?

The session’s strength is its structural scale. It asks us to measure democracy not only through formal procedures but through the real possibility of living, speaking and participating without violence distributing risk in advance. Its scope is theoretical; it is not a comparative assessment of legal systems or a ready-made policy for every context. UNAM Global’s report on the lecture summarizes the frame. The book Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism in Latin America offers a useful counterpoint by tracing how constitutional and legal institutions handle related questions in specific settings.

Lecture and context

• Session 6 of the PUEDJS-UNAM course
• UNAM Global: feminist democracy and full citizenship