My PhD investigates how women are transforming capoeira: an Afro-Brazilian martial art, dance, and musical tradition. Until the 1970s, women were actively excluded from capoeira in Brazil. The last 40 years, however, have seen a steady increase in the number of female students and teachers practising capoeira both in Brazil and abroad. This is challenging historical male-centred narratives and images of authenticity and authority in the art form.  As a practising researcher of capoeira, I use an ethnographic approach to document, compare, and analyse women's experiences in capoeira in Brazil and in Europe. My principal research methods are semi-structured interviews with female leaders that took place in 2023, and fieldwork notes as an observing participant at capoeira events I attended in Brazil and in Europe from 2021-2024. This multi-sited, cross-cultural study will help establish the continuities and differences between female leadership in capoeira in various countries.  For my research I draw on multiple fields of study: Afro-Brazilian culture, music, and history; education; social sciences; race and gender theory; martial arts studies; decolonial theory; sports and performance studies; and cultural studies. This interdisciplinary framework will help me demonstrate how capoeira, an art of decolonial resistance, can be considered an inverted feminist epistemology of the body from the 'Global South'.