This article discusses how national women's policy agencies were being structured in Brazil in the period immediately before the 2016 coup. Based on interviews with feminist activists and state managers and ethnographic work carried out during the 3rd and 4th National Conferences on Public Policies for Women, it addresses that political agreements, alliances and coalitions in the name of governance overlapped the possibilities created by the participatory spaces of encounters between feminisms and State, undermining a progressive agenda while strengthening and consolidate retrograde forces.