Political pedagogies and the formation of conservative women in the public sphere

Abstract

This study investigates how conservative religious and party-political spaces have contributed to the formation of women leaders seeking to occupy the public sphere and institutional politics. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography conducted at training events, across digital networks, within party initiatives, and through women’s religious circuits, I examine how particular political pedagogies articulate gender, morality, care, aesthetics, and authority in producing legitimate forms of public engagement. The central argument is that these women’s political presence does not begin with candidacy or elected office. Rather, it is produced beforehand within a hybrid pedagogical-political ecosystem that brings together systematic training, everyday digital coordination, and ritualized in-person events. The article’s ethnographic focus is the five-month observation of the nationwide WhatsApp group “Você, Eleita 10 – 2024” (“You, Elected 10 – 2024”), affiliated with the Mulheres Republicanas (Republican Women) movement, considered in relation to training meetings and the inauguration of the Special Office of the Women’s Ombudsperson at the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The findings indicate that these spaces teach not only technical knowledge about elections and political institutions but also ways of speaking, waiting, dressing, narrating hardships, and understanding politics as a vocation. Rather than merely reacting to feminism, these women are actively constructing their own grammar of political participation, grounded in religious, affective, media-based, and aesthetic repertoires. Religion therefore emerges not as a residue of modernity, but as a constitutive dimension of contemporary processes of subject formation, political organization, and moral governance.