Brazilian Migrant Women as Killjoys: Disclosing Racism in “Friendly” Portugal

Abstract

In this article, we place Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist killjoy” into dialogues with feminist migration studies and decolonial studies, to explore how Brazilian women in Portugal become “killjoys” by challenging their construction as a “colonial body” and unveiling the fallacious narrative of Portugal as a non-racist country. Guided by a feminist decolonial approach and using virtual ethnography together with an in-depth interview, this study examines the digitized resistance of Brazilian migrant women in Portugal against discrimination and prejudice. Evidence is drawn from an analysis of the 541 posts published between July 2020 and July 2021 by the Instagram account of the “Brasileiras não se calam” project, along with an interview with the project’s coordinating board.