In What Kind of Brazil Will Women Live? Brazil 2026 Presidential Election

Body-Territory, income, care, and the concrete possibility of choosing one’s own life

Perhaps the question is not only whether a woman is free.

Perhaps it is:

Can she actually use that freedom?

Imagine a woman thinking about leaving a violent relationship.

She may know that she needs to leave.

She may have friends telling her to leave.

There may already be a protective court order.

But then other questions appear.

Where will she go?

Who will pay the rent?

Who will stay with the children while she works?

How will she get to work?

Is childcare available?

Does she have money in an account that only she controls?

Is there a protection network close to where she lives?

Perhaps this is where we begin to realize that freedom does not exist only within consciousness.

It needs to encounter possibilities in the territory.

In 2025, Brazil recorded 1,568 femicides, the highest number since the historical series began in 2015. Samira Bueno, researcher and executive director of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, draws attention precisely to a territorial problem: an important part of the protection infrastructure is concentrated in larger cities, while many women live in places where that network barely reaches them. (publicacoes.forumseguranca.org.br)

We can then ask an uncomfortable question:

What is the value of recognizing a freedom if the material conditions required to exercise it do not exist?

The body may want to leave. But can it?

This is where the concept of Body-Territory changes the way we look at the problem.

Márcia Tait, Alcides Peron, and Marcela Suárez revisit body-territory through Latin American feminist traditions in order to make visible the power relations that simultaneously traverse bodies, territories, and technologies. Instead of imagining an isolated individual, we can observe how what happens to a territory also reorganizes bodily possibilities. (tandfonline.com)

Perhaps we can bring this into something very ordinary.

A woman may be qualified but live far from her workplace.

She may find a job but not find childcare.

She may earn a salary but still devote far more time to care work.

She may have political rights but reach the end of the day with no time left to participate in public life.

In Brazil, women spent an average of 21.3 hours per week caring for people and performing domestic work in 2022; among men, the figure was 11.7 hours. Inequalities also exist among women themselves: income, race, and territory deeply shape this burden. (educa.ibge.gov.br)

Childcare shows us how an apparently external structure can transform individual possibilities.

The 2026 RASEAM report found an employment rate of 68% among women with children aged zero to three when all of them attended childcare. Among women whose children were only partially covered by childcare, the rate was 36.5%. (gov.br)

Choice does not happen only “inside the person.”

It encounters open or closed doors in the territory.

Those who care also give away time from their own lives

Latin American researchers have been insisting on this point.

Uruguayan scholar Karina Batthyány, together with Sharon Katzkowicz, has shown how different childcare policies are related to women’s participation in the labor market and to the distribution of family responsibilities. (revistamexicanadesociologia.unam.mx)

Costa Rican researcher Juliana Martínez Franzoni argues that reorganizing care with greater equality requires both more male participation and adequate public services. Otherwise, what we call a “family choice” may continue to place a structural responsibility on women. (kerwa.ucr.ac.cr)

In Brazil, Nadya Araujo Guimarães draws attention to the specifically Latin American dimension of the so-called care crisis: we are not dealing only with a private matter between members of a family, but with infrastructures, inequalities, and social arrangements that determine who cares for whom. (scielo.br)

We can therefore broaden the question.

Perhaps women’s autonomy is not simply about having a job.

It is about having income, time, safety, care, and the possibility of movement.

What if the State began with the person?

Here we arrive at the proposal we are developing at BrainLatam.

Today, many economic policies still look first at the family, employment, companies, household income, or a specific condition of vulnerability.

But what if the Constitution recognized the Body-Territory as the minimum unit of the State?

This would not mean denying families or communities.

It would mean recognizing that, before belonging to a family, a company, or a marital relationship, every person is the holder of their own economic citizenship.

And this changes the question especially for women.

Because a benefit delivered to a household may reach a woman.

But a right that belongs to the Body-Territory begins with her.

Country Income: an economic minimum that belongs to the person

We therefore propose discussing what we call Country Income.

It would be a universal public basic income distributed individually to every Body-Territory through a public digital infrastructure capable of interacting with Pix and, in the model we call Citizen Drex, with a retail digital currency layer.

It would not be a loan.

It would not be financing.

It would not create personal debt.

It would be what, in our model, we call a citizenship credit without debt for the citizen: an economic floor belonging to the person because that person is part of the country.

It is important to distinguish our proposal from the infrastructure that currently exists.

The Drex being developed by the Central Bank of Brazil is still under construction and testing. Under the present official architecture, end users would access the system through authorized financial intermediaries; in the Drex Pilot, final users do not even participate directly, and their operations are simulated. Therefore, Citizen Drex and Country Income are BrainLatam proposals for a future architecture, not features of the current Drex system. (bcb.gov.br)

The Central Bank’s own research agenda recognizes that CBDCs can adopt different architectures around the world, including both direct and intermediated distribution models. (bcb.gov.br)

Our question is political:

What if part of that infrastructure were designed around individual citizenship?

Money would not solve everything. But it would change a choice

We do not want to turn income into a single explanation for violence.

A woman with money may still need police protection.

Justice.

Housing.

Healthcare.

Transportation.

Childcare.

Community support.

Protection from an aggressor.

But there is a difference between saying:

“You are free to leave.”

and being able to say:

“There is an economic minimum that will remain yours after you leave.”

Researchers Cristina Vega Solís and Ailynn Torres Santana, working within Latin American feminist debates, analyzed in 2022 the possibilities and tensions between universal basic income and care income. They show that this discussion cannot be separated from the sexual and racial division of labor and from the way socially produced wealth is distributed. (revistas.ucm.es)

This is where our proposal differs from simply creating another line of credit.

A woman should not have to go into debt in order to stop being economically dependent on someone else.

The economic floor needs to exist before the emergency.

It should belong to the person before marriage.

During marriage.

After marriage.

With a job or without a job.

With children or without children.

And the same right would be distributed to men and women because its origin would not be gender, but the constitutional recognition of every Body-Territory as a unit of economic citizenship.

Its consequences, however, may be different for those who have historically had fewer material possibilities from which to choose.

What do the presidential candidates see?

When we read the plans for the Brazil 2026 Presidential Election, we find different parts of this problem.

Lula proposes expanding protection against femicide, promoting economic autonomy and equal opportunities, and strengthening structures such as Women’s Houses and equal-pay policies. (tse.jus.br)

Flávio Bolsonaro created the Brasil por Elas axis, bringing together protection, professional training, income, entrepreneurship, a Women’s Center, and the expansion of childcare, including a proposed voucher when public places are unavailable. (tse.jus.br)

Augusto Cury, through the Mulheres Vivas program, connects femicide prevention, technology, geolocation, monitoring of aggressors, and economic autonomy. His own plan recognizes that financial dependence can prevent women from leaving violent relationships. (tse.jus.br)

Ronaldo Caiado organizes proposals related to violence, income, housing, work, and women’s political participation without violence, including monitoring indicators such as childcare access and unpaid care time. (tse.jus.br)

Clariana Barão places “women and children first,” connecting protection against violence, childcare, professional reintegration, care, and economic autonomy. (tse.jus.br)

Samara Martins proposes fighting femicide, equal pay, childcare at the workplace, and shorter working hours. (tse.jus.br)

Edmilson Costa includes combating sexism and violence, expanding shelters, and socializing care infrastructures. Hertz Dias presents a broad axis on women, connecting violence to income, housing, and care, while proposing full-time childcare, public care services, and shorter working hours. (tse.jus.br)

In Romeu Zema’s program, femicide and domestic violence appear within the social protection agenda; his strategy emphasizes productive inclusion, work, shelters, and the rebuilding of autonomy. (tse.jus.br)

In the plans we consulted for Renan Santos, Rui Costa Pimenta, and Wilson Grassi, we did not identify an axis on women as developed as those above; in Rui’s case, there is a specific proposal for differentiated retirement rules for women. For Pablo Marçal, we continue to await registered programmatic documentation that would allow us to safely attribute a specific position. (tse.jus.br)

What if autonomy were an infrastructure?

Women already represent 52.84% of Brazil’s electorate in 2026: more than 83 million voters. Even so, they remain underrepresented in positions of power. (tse.jus.br)

Perhaps, then, the question of this article is not which candidate “talks more about women.”

We can ask something larger.

What conditions does each proposal create so that a woman can choose her own life?

Because safety expands possibilities.

Childcare expands possibilities.

Time expands possibilities.

Income expands possibilities.

Political participation expands possibilities.

And territory organizes all of them.

This is where a Decolonial Neuroscience also needs to broaden what we mean by agency.

Not asking only what a woman “decided.”

But also:

Which movements were actually available to that Body-Territory?

Perhaps freedom is not simply being able to desire a different life.

Perhaps freedom begins when there is a material path that makes it possible to reach that life.

And if we recognize each Body-Territory as the minimum unit of the State, perhaps we can build something still missing from the electoral debate:

an economic minimum that does not belong to the husband, the family, the employer, or the bank.

One that belongs to the person.

Then a woman can still choose to stay.

But she can also choose to leave.

Not because the State decided for her.

Precisely because it helped guarantee the minimum conditions required for the decision to finally be hers.

References

BUENO, Samira. Feminicídio recorde e o desafio de fazer a proteção chegar a todas as mulheres. Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2026. (fontesegura.forumseguranca.org.br)

TAIT, Márcia M.; PERON, Alcides Eduardo dos Reis; SUÁREZ, Marcela. Terrestrial politics and body-territory: two concepts to make sense of digital colonialism in Latin America. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2022. (tandfonline.com)

VEGA SOLÍS, Cristina; TORRES SANTANA, Ailynn. Renta básica universal y renta de cuidados en los debates feministas. La perspectiva de la reapropiación de la riqueza. Política y Sociedad, 2022. (revistas.ucm.es)

BATTHYÁNY DIGHIERO, Karina; KATZKOWICZ JUNIO, Sharon. Percepciones sobre las políticas de cuidado infantil en Uruguay. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 2022. (revistamexicanadesociologia.unam.mx)

MARTÍNEZ FRANZONI, Juliana. Cuidados: Entre la ola feminista y la austeridad. Nueva Sociedad, 2022. (kerwa.ucr.ac.cr)

GUIMARÃES, Nadya Araujo. A “crise do cuidado” e os cuidados na crise: refletindo a partir da experiência brasileira. Sociologia & Antropologia, 2024. (scielo.br)

IBGE. Gender Statistics: Social Indicators of Women in Brazil. Data on time use and care work, 2024. (educa.ibge.gov.br)

MINISTRY OF WOMEN. 2026 Annual Socioeconomic Report on Women — RASEAM. Brasília, 2026. (gov.br)

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL. Drex Pilot; Drex — Digital Real; Research Agenda 2026–2029. References used to distinguish the current Drex architecture from BrainLatam’s Citizen Drex proposal. (bcb.gov.br)

SUPERIOR ELECTORAL COURT. Government Proposals — 2026 Elections. Official plans used in the comparative analysis of presidential candidacies. (tse.jus.br)