Anti-feminist and anti-trans war marks Bolsonarism – 03/25/2023 – Politics

Who does not remember the first day of Damares Alves (Republicanos-DF) as Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights? On that January 2, 2019, she went viral when she announced at the inauguration ceremony: “Attention! Attention! It’s a new era in Brazil: boys wear blue and girls wear pink”.

The phrase generated controversy, but Damares did not back down. The following day, he doubled down on the metaphor: “Let’s respect the biological identity of children. And I’ll say more, we can call a girl a princess and a boy a prince in Brazil, there’s no confusion about it.”

It was a clear sign that the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) would launch a war against flags of the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements, such as gender equality, same-sex marriage, the decriminalization of abortion and the recognition of the rights of transgender people.

The electoral defeat in 2022 does not seem to have changed Bolsonaristas’ plans in this agenda sometimes defined as a “behavioral agenda”.

It is enough to see the flood of anti-trans bills across the country, or the speech in which Deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) mocks transsexual women, to realize that the fight has only changed places.

“This opposition to feminist guidelines and sexual freedoms can manifest itself in state and municipal governments, in city councils, in legislative assemblies, in the religious arena”, says Flávia Biroli, professor of political science at UnB (University of Brasília).

The difference, according to Biroli, is that this was an official agenda of the Bolsonaro government, with the elimination of some public policies and the budget cut of others.

Initiatives like these are the visible face of deeper transformations that Biroli examines in the article “Reactions to gender equality and state occupation in the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022)”, whose preliminary version was presented at the 46th meeting of Anpocs (National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Social Sciences).

In the work, carried out in partnership with Luciana Tatagiba (Unicamp) and Débora Françolin Quintela (UnB), Biroli analyzes the profile of all the people who occupied first and second level positions in three ministries: Education, Health and Women, Family and Human Rights.

She noticed that the Bolsonaro government reduced plurality within the state, denying the validity of feminist, LGBTQIA+ and anti-racist perspectives, for example.

It is new because, since the 1988 Constitution, the State has been feeding on different points of view of civil society, with the incorporation of contradictory demands in the process of producing public policies.

According to the survey, the Bolsonarist coalition, populated by religious conservatives, exercised unprecedented veto power over egalitarian policies, blocking guidelines on abortion, violence against women and education for gender equality and sexual diversity, among others.

In place of this agenda, the Bolsonaro government imposed a worldview in which there are only men and women, both heterosexuals, and where there is control over women’s reproductive autonomy.

And this was not the former president’s only strategy to face what Bolsonarists call “gender ideology”.

In an article also presented at Anpocs, sociologist Marília Moschkovich shows that the ministry of Damares Alves eliminated the gender perspective from its work –which assumes greater diversity— to work only with ideas such as “woman” and “family”.

According to the analysis by Moschkovich, who is a professor at the Department of Sociology at USP, the eradication reached Damares’ official social networks, such as Twitter and YouTube.

In the text “Common sense as State policy: ‘woman’ and ‘family’ in anti-gender public policy and the new grammar of human rights in the government of Jair Bolsonaro”, the sociologist examines more than 6,000 tweets by the then minister.

Moschkovich discovers that only 6 of them contained the word “gender”. Even so, in 2 cases, the use was made in another sense, as in educational genre; in the other 4, it was included in the expression “gender ideology”.

For the sociologist, this strategy allows Bolsonarists to deflate a concept to which they are opposed; if they adopted an explicit challenge, they could generate more attention on the gender perspective.

In addition, according to her, Bolsonarism seeks to associate the supposed weakening of family ties with social problems, so that the traditional family can appear as a solution.

Moschkovich says to Sheet that this creates a difficulty of contestation: “Sectors of opposition to Bolsonaro cannot say against women, against the family. Especially because the family is one of the clearest demands of the LGBT movement: the right to marry, to adopt children, etc. “.

At the same time, she says, this mobilizes even those who are not root Bolsonarists. “People who don’t buy the whole thing, but the part about protecting women and protecting families.”

For the sociologist, the situation does not change just because Bolsonaro lost the election. Or at least it will take time to change.

“The setbacks that Bolsonarism caused will last for a long time. The debates of the feminist movement are like those of 10, 12 years ago. Even alternative private schools stopped talking about gender due to demands from parents. Teachers were persecuted”, he says. Moschkovich.

From the point of view of the conservative right, quite a victory in a battle that did not start in 2018 and is not restricted to Brazil. It goes back to the 1990s, when the Vatican began using the expression “gender ideology” in the context of disputes over reproductive and sexual rights (abortion and same-sex marriage, for example).

Sociologist Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira tells this story in the article “Women and the family: Pentecostal agendas in the dispute for the grammar of human rights”, co-authored with Olívia Alves Barbosa (USP).

In the text, Teixeira shows how Bolsonaro has been part of this debate since 2011, in a path that involves the defense of the “natural family” (father, mother and children), the Escola Sem Partido, the attack on the kit against homophobia – nicknamed ” gay kit”—and the fake news of the dick bottle.

Sometimes this agenda is defined by analysts as a smokescreen for real problems, but Teixeira, who is a professor at the Department of Sociology at UnB, does not see it that way.

“This is a dispute over the human rights agenda”, says Teixeira to Sheet. “There is a connection with an international right that disputes human rights forums. And I’m talking specifically about the UN [Organização das Nações Unidas].”

For example, when talking about a 10-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle, Damares and Bolsonaro reject abortion, although it is authorized by law, and consider that the fight against pedophilia is the true human rights agenda in this case.

For Teixeira, who is a researcher at Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning), these articulations will not disappear with the electoral defeat. “Bolsonarism is much bigger than Bolsonaro,” she says.