Women in Decolonial Neuroscience

Structural Christian Machismo, the Body, Power, and the Erasure of Women’s Space



Women in Decolonial Neuroscience

On International Women’s Day, many messages follow a predictable script: recognition, appreciation, tribute. These gestures can be meaningful, but they rarely touch the structural core of the problem.

The central question is not whether women deserve recognition.

The deeper question is how certain societies learned to restrict women’s space and present that restriction as natural, moral, or even divine.

For centuries, the Christianized West circulated a powerful narrative: that women were born to obey, serve, withdraw, and occupy less space. In this story, men speak, lead, interpret God, decide on war, and govern social order. Women, in contrast, care, endure, and remain silent.

Decolonial Neuroscience begins from a different starting point.

Before any cultural script of “man” or “woman,” there is life.
There is the body.
There is interoception.
There is proprioception.
There is autonomic regulation.
There is the experience of inhabiting territory and moving within it.

Before being captured by rigid gender narratives, human beings are living organisms regulating themselves in relation to the environment.

The problem begins when living differences become rigid hierarchies. When identities cease to be experiences and become mandatory behavioral scripts.

That is where structural machismo gains its power.

Machismo as a Technology of Bodily Restriction

Structural machismo is not simply an opinion or a personal prejudice. It functions as a cultural technology that organizes bodies.

It organizes who speaks.
It organizes who moves.
It organizes who occupies space.
It organizes who decides.

It teaches men to perform hardness, superiority, and control.
It teaches women to perform containment, vigilance over themselves, guilt, and withdrawal.

These processes are not merely symbolic. They reorganize how bodies regulate threat, belonging, and safety.

Contemporary neuroscience already shows that structural inequality and violence shape trajectories of brain health. A recent analysis led by Argentine neuroscientist Sandra Baez demonstrates that gender inequality affects the brain through multiple pathways, including the exposome, health behavior, access to care, and risk of cognitive decline in the Global South. In other words, oppression enters the brain as an environmental condition (Baez et al., 2024).

This shifts the entire discussion.

The body is not a secondary element of politics.
The body is the first territory where politics is inscribed.

When a girl grows up learning to speak less, occupy less space, and constantly monitor her behavior, she is not only receiving culture. Her attentional patterns, defensive responses, and self-regulation strategies are being shaped.

When a boy learns that masculinity means dominance and control, he is also being shaped—trained to occupy space at the expense of others and often trapped in a rigid role of domination.

Machismo therefore becomes more than a moral injustice.
It becomes a system of bodily and social regulation.

When Religious Morality Becomes Policy Over Bodies

Structural Christian machismo cannot be understood solely as individual belief. It becomes particularly powerful when it transforms into political agenda and institutional design.

Recent studies on religion and politics in Brazil show how Christian conservative movements have mobilized anti-gender and pro-family agendas to influence legislation, public policy, and education debates. These movements frequently present specific religious moral values as if they were universal democratic principles (Carranza & Vital, 2024).

The effects are not merely discursive.

When moral narratives become public policy, women’s institutional protection can decrease. A study examining Brazilian municipalities found that more conservative electorates were associated with lower adoption of policies addressing violence against women (Araújo, 2022).

This reveals an important dynamic:

gender ideology does not remain in symbolic discourse—it reorganizes real systems of protection and vulnerability.

What Latin American Science Shows About Violence Against Women

Recent research in Brazil reveals a disturbing scenario.

A national study estimated that approximately one in five women reported experiencing violence in the previous year. Psychological violence was the most common form, the primary aggressor was an intimate partner, and most incidents occurred within the home (Vasconcelos et al., 2025).

Other research shows that gender violence intensifies where territorial vulnerability, racial inequality, and precarious labor conditions intersect. Studies conducted in Brazilian favelas during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed strong links between intimate partner violence, mental distress, and structural conditions such as informal work, urban insecurity, and domestic overload (Campos et al., 2025).

These findings reinforce a key insight:

gender violence is not an isolated event—it is a systemic phenomenon.

It emerges from the interaction of economic inequality, cultural norms, institutional failures, and historical power structures.

Latin American research increasingly frames gender violence as a complex public health and human rights issue, associated with depression, suicidal ideation, chronic pain, and long-term mental health consequences (Pispira et al., 2022).

Body–Territory: When the Body Ceases to Be an Object

One of the most powerful concepts emerging from Latin American feminist thought is body-territory.

Indigenous, Amazonian, and decolonial feminist scholars argue that women are not simply defending abstract rights. They are defending their bodies as territories of life, memory, care, and political struggle.

Research on women in the Brazilian Amazon shows how the concept of body-territory connects environmental justice, gender violence, and resistance to land dispossession (Miranda et al., 2023).

This perspective disrupts the colonial separation between body, land, and politics.

The female body ceases to be an object of moral control and becomes a living center of knowledge, reproduction of life, and collective future.

Who Produces Science Also Matters

Science itself is not immune to the inequalities it studies.

A study on the Latin American neuroscience community identified persistent gender inequalities within scientific careers, affecting funding access, career progression, and academic recognition for women researchers (Bouzat et al., 2021).

This insight is crucial.

There is no truly decolonial neuroscience without asking:

Who produces knowledge?
From which body?
Under which social conditions?

Science is not produced in a vacuum.
It is produced by bodies located within histories, territories, and relations of power.

A Difficult Question for International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day might require fewer slogans and more difficult questions.

Not simply:

What is the role of women?

But rather:

Which narratives are still capturing women’s bodies, restricting their movement, authority, and presence in public life?

And even deeper:

What kind of society needs to diminish women in order to function?

A society that depends on the humiliation or containment of women to sustain itself is not stable.

It is a society in chronic defense.

It is a society that replaces belonging with control,
bodies with norms,
and life with domination.

A Simple and Radical Conclusion

Women are not extensions of men.
Women are not concessions granted by the state.
Women are not moral silence justified by religion.

Women are body.
Women are territory.
Women are intelligence.
Women are memory.
Women are science.
Women are future.

Any civilization that attempts to erase this reality is not defending God, family, or order.

It is merely refining the mechanisms of violence.

References

(Latin American researchers, post-2020)

Baez, S., Ibáñez, A., et al. (2024). Enhancing brain health in the Global South through a sex and gender lens. Nature Mental Health.

Bouzat, C., et al. (2021). Gender inequality in the Latin American neuroscience community. IBRO Neuroscience Reports.

Carranza, B., & Vital, C. (2024). Democracy and the Christian Right in Brazil: Family, sexualities and religious freedom. Religions.

Araújo, V. (2022). Can conservatism make women more vulnerable to violence? Comparative Political Studies.

Vasconcelos, N. M., et al. (2025). Who are the adult women exposed to violence in Brazil? National epidemiological study.

Campos, M. C. T., et al. (2025). Violence experienced by women and mental health in Brazilian favelas during COVID-19. Public health research.

Pispira, J., et al. (2022). Gender-based violence in Latin America: current state and challenges. Public health research.

Miranda, C. M., et al. (2023). Women in the Amazon: struggles in defense of their body-territories. Revista Estudos Feministas.

Avenida Aleixo Cionek – A História Viva de Goioerê

Mujeres en la Neurociencia Decolonial

Women in Decolonial Neuroscience

Mulheres na Neurociência Decolonial

Trigémino (APUS), Vago (TEKOHA), Corazón, mTOR y Sueño

Trigeminal (APUS), Vagus (TEKOHA), Heart, mTOR, and Sleep

Pan de la Vida para Madres Padres Investigadores y Educadores

Bread of Life for Mothers Fathers Researchers and Educators

O Pão da Vida para Mães Pais Pesquisadores e Educadores

Feminicídios e Suicídios no Estado Sequestrado

Trigêmeo (APUS), Vago (TEKOHA), Coração, mTOR e Sono

Trigêmeo (APUS), Vago (TEKOHA) e Coração: como nasce um Eu Tensional

Mujeres en Política Ciencia y Religión Decolonial

#Pertencimento
#CBDCdeVarejo
#PIX
#DREX
#DrexCidadão
#mTOR
#SleepScience
#BodyTerritory
#Wellbeing
#Consciousness
#Feminicidio
#Suicidio
#EstadoSequestrado
#SaudeMental
#ViolenciaContraMulher
#SensoCritico
#Zona3
#Trigemeo
#APUS
#TEKOHA
#NervoVago
#EuTensional
#AvAleixoCionek
#PioneirosDeGoioere
#BrainLatam #JacksonCionek #NeurocienciaDecolonial