by Sonia Corrêa
Time to mourn
Politics is both reasoning and affect. This is how the first version of this essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the Brazilian 2018 elections, began. The reasonable charting of what happened in Brazil was urgent, but also extremely painful. Having watched, for many years, the building up of Brazilian ultra-conservative politics around abortion, sexuality, and gender, I was not exactly surprised with the electoral outcome. Yet, the full-blown materialization of multiple ultra-right cyclonic formations in the ireful electoral process, the brutal images of post-victory commemorations, and the elected candidate speeches have thrown me into an unknown land.
While processing these troubling sentiments, this “new reality” provoked me to re-read a number of classical articles on Fascism as well as some remarkable 2016 analyses of the Trump election. One of them was Teju Cole´s piece, titled Time for Refusal , published in the New York Times. It recaptures the Ionesco play “The Rhinoceros” in which the population of a whole village is mutated into a band of rhinoceros. This metaphor portrays how subjectivities and the public sphere can be radically altered while everything appears to be normal. In November 2018, as one of these Ionesco characters, I suddenly realized that the “unknown land” where I found myself had been always there, lurking in the deep layers of inertial social conservatism, which remained untransformed through decades of democratization. In a state of shock, I could sharply grasp how a vicious electoral process, based on Whatsapp and fake news had activated and converted the deep stratum of racism, classism, and heteropatriarchy, into virulent rhetoric and propelled the required energy to take power a neo-Fascist figure.
Since then I have been torn between the anxiety to more fully understand what has happened to my country, and very harsh moments of sorrow and fear. While navigating these waves of estrangement, loss, and grief, I realized, once again, that in order to be able to re-exist, it was vital to continue examining the intricate paths that brought us here.[1] What follows is a preliminary exercise aimed at deciphering these intricate pathways. The original essay has been slightly revised and updated in order to briefly grasp what we have seen happening since October 30th, 2018.
Systemic undercurrents
The undercurrents leading to the political catastrophe of the 2018 Brazilian elections are multiple, imbricate, and thorny. Years will probably elapse before they can be more thoroughly understood. Yet, in a rather precarious bird’s eye view, they encompass continuing patterns of inequality and structural violence unresolved after three decades of democracy., but also the nefarious fingerprints of entrenched political corruption. Another key trend to be looked at is the growth and polarization of religious and moral dogmatism, particularly amongst evangelicals, but not exclusively, as the post-1980s Catholic conservative restoration has also left behind a web of orthodoxy and strengthened ultra-Catholic groupings such as TFP and Opus Dei. Not less importantly. this assessment cannot evade neither the non-sustained economic growth the country experienced since the 1980s’ nor the post-2013 recession that devastated employment rates and, as analyzed by Lavinas and Gonçalves (in Portuguese) contributed to pushing the middle classes toward the lap of the ultra-right.
Not less significantly, the Brazilian rightward shift cannot be explained without referring to the popular frustrations with the PT (Workers Party) corruption, steadily amplified by lawfare and the right-wing rhetoric. This dissatisfaction, combined with other claims, became palpable in the 2013 wave of street protests – known as the Fall Journeys – to be subsequently monopolized and magnified by far-right formation, which gained leverage in the protests preceding the ousting Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The irascible anti–PT propaganda then crafted would later become one backbone of Bolsonaro´s electoral strategy that, as it has been widely discussed nationally and internationally, was based upon a full-blown and oiled digital machinery, as analyzed by Kalil and her team in their ground-breaking report on Bolsonaro voters and electoral strategies.
Last but not least, the far-rightward political shift that materialized in the 2018 election – while quite drastic – cannot be fully grasped if transformations that have taken place in Brazilian society and legal frames in relation to the gender and sexuality dimensions of social and personal life, since the 1980s, are not considered. As feminists and LGBTTI activists know very well, strong signs that an ultra-conservative restoration was building up were increasingly palpable, at least since the mid-2000s, in the realms of abortion and sexuality-related rights, but also in the well-established domain of HIV policies. This is so even if even the central place of these matters in the ultra-right agenda of the Bolsonaro political project would not be grasped until much later by the mainstream press and other well-recognized analysts.
De-democratizing trends, late capitalism, and anti-gender politics
After the 2016 US elections, SPW wrote a short note underlining that, without minimizing the weight of the US hegemony, Trump’s arrival to power should not be read as exceptional. But rather as a new chapter in a chain of conservative restorations or undemocratic shifts that had been sweeping the world for some time. The same applies to Bolsonaro´s election in 2018. Taking a long view, this chain of events can be traced back to 9/11/2001, and the subsequent “war on terror” which was correctly read by various authors as the very first strong sign of de-democratization in the US. This turn would inevitably impact the rest of the world. Right after 9/11 Putin and Erdogan, two current icons of autocracy came to power. Less than ten years later, democratic regressions were sweeping across all continents: the coups in Honduras and Paraguay, the demise of the Arab Spring, the victory of the National Hindu Party (BJP) in India and of Orbán in Hungary, and the Nicaraguan constitutional reform allowing Ortega to be perennially re-elected.
Then came the 2016 trail that began with the Brazilian parliamentary coup and moved towards the election of Duterte in the Philippines, the Brexit referendum, Erdogan’s state of exception in Turkey, and then Trump´s “shocking victory” . Since then, ultra-right-wing forces have gained muscles in France, Germany, and Sweden before winning the Italian elections. After the October 28th electoral results, Brazil fully joined the trail as the new kid in the block, but not a minor piece in the global domino of de-democratization. As observed by CELAG (in Spanish), the rest of Latin America found itself squeezed between right-wing powers ruling the “two big ones”. When placed onto the global South mapping the BRICS, which initially comprised authoritarian or autocratic regimes (China and Russia) and democracies (Brazil, India, and South Africa), became almost entirely undemocratic.
De-democratization enabled
With very few exceptions, these de-democratizing strands have materialized “through democratic procedures”. Not all the political regimes listed above are bluntly repressive and brutal but can be described as functioning democracies. Neither all their leaders are grotesque as Trump, Bolsonaro, or Duterte. But a number of them, are sustained in power either by stark or subtle means of silencing dissidents and strengthening their grips over institutions such as the judiciaries. A whole library is now available that scrutinizes how present and past democracies can deteriorate and have deteriorated towards autocracies, dictatorships, and neo-fascism. While it is not possible to fully recover the wealth of this vast literature, one key line of interpretation to bear in mind when examining the Brazilian post-electoral scenario is the intersection between late capitalism, democracy, and de-democratization.
Ultra-neoliberalism and the anti-gender crusade
One main argument of this line of thinking is that despite the faith in classical liberal tenets, capitalism in its current neoliberal and financial forms does not depend, or enable democratic environments. Neoliberal rationality is highly adaptable. It was piloted in the 1970s Pinochet dictatorship before being transported to the UK and the US and later to the most diverse political environments across the world, including “Communist” China. In this context of analysis, it is worth recalling that the Pinochet regime was also firmly allied with the ultra-conservative sectors of the Catholic Church and imposed a rigid morality on Chilean society, including by mobilizing the Supreme Court to fully prohibit abortion.
Moving to the US, Wendy Brown has shown in The American Nightmare how these two neoliberal rationality and religious neoconservatism intertwine in late capitalism. In her scrutiny of the the Bush era, she examines how this rationality based on deregulation and amorality (neoliberalism) and religious tenets based on morality (neo-conservatism), which on the surface appear not to have many affinities, became deeply imbricate. This collusion produces political subjectivities that, indifferent to truth, political freedom, and equality, tend to easily adhere to anti-democratic political and policy agendas.
This overlapping is not exclusive, however, of US conditions. Worldwide, the detrimental economic effects of neoliberalism but also the spread of its political and subjective rationality have fed conditions in which de-democratization easily prosper. But in not all settings where these effects are palpable right-wing populism and proto-fascist formations have surged. Before that, hierarchical, androcentric (when not bluntly patriarchal), homophobic political regimes existed – either secular or religious – in which gender equality and sexual freedom were abhorred. Yet, until recently, not all societies subject to autocratic regimes had been so deeply penetrated by neoliberal rationalities. Context and temporalities always matter.
Looking at the Brazilian context – in connection with de-democratizing trends underway in other Latin American and European countries — it is not excessive to say that the crusade against “gender ideology” invented by the Vatican in the 1990s is another key piece to be taken into account when analyzing this complicated patterns (Patternote and Kuhar, 2017; Corrêa, Patternote and Kuhar, 2018). Howveer, the Vatican accusatory parlance against gender is not merely functional to ultra-neoliberal interests and rationalities. The Vatican’s anti-gender crusade has its own rationale and long-term goals, which may or not coincide with ultra-neoliberal interests. Not less important, though crafted and propelled by religious ultra-conservatism and ultra-right forces, anti-gender arguments are also raised at the left side of the political spectrum,[2] even in Latin America, where “gender ideology” has been, since the 1990s politically deployed as the new face of Communism, Castro- Chavismo or, in Brazil, Petismo.
Despite these contradictions, the anti-gender crusades initially propelled by highly heterogeneous religious formations are, in a variety of ways, imbricated with neo-liberal actors and rationalities. This cross-fertilization explains why hearts and minds are so easily captured by the cyclones propelled by this formation. This is exactly what happened in Brazil.
“Gender as communism”: a politics of glue and assemblages
As grasped by Isabela Oliveira Kalil and her team in analysing the ideal types of Bolsonaro’s voters, a substantive part of this electorate shares ultra-liberal views on privatization, while at the same time fiercely repudiating abortion rights and “gender ideology”. The adherence to this double bind agenda is grounded on firm convictions: the free market is a synonym of democracy; the state is corrupted and corrupting, but the private sector is not; legal moral restrictions are not undemocratic but rather a due restraint of state intervention to preserve family structures and religious morality. And, these convictions link up with “corruption” as a floating signifier that is associated with “left-wing political corruption” but also with sexual morality and the aversion to social protection and affirmative action policies, which are described as “corrupting” the possibilities of individuals to achieve their goals through merit. The “good citizen”, a core figure of Bolsonaro’s politics, is the person, man or woman, engaged in interchangeably battling corruption in all these fronts.
The economic pieces of the 2018 electoral agenda were put into circulation by the social conservative ultra-liberals of Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) and other “liberal” groupings that gained much leverage in the course of the last few years. Its wider absorption was favored by the gradual penetration of the neoliberal logic in the social fabric, that since the 1980s was reinforced by the pervasive influence of the neo-Pentecostal theology of prosperity. Not surprisingly evangelicals constitutet the main champions and proportionally largest groups of religious of Bolsonaro´s voters in 2018 (check figures). Recovering Serrano´s analysis (in Spanish) of how “gender ideology” disrupted the 2016 Colombia Peace Agreement Referendum, the Brazilian election has taken this phantasm to another scale, grabbing the fears and fantasies of 59 million highly heterogeneous voters in a very short period of time. A perfect and massive storm.
Though a further review of empirical data would be required to make this argument more solid, having Andrea Peto’s frame in mind, my own hypothesis is that in Latin America, and Brazil, in particular, “gender ideology” also functioned as a symbolic glue collating disparate contents, emotions, and political adherents. This glue did not collate exclusively contents and meanings related to sexuality, gender, and abortion. It also attracted and amplified dispersed elements evoking the specter of communism. In Colombia, as analyzed by Franklin Gil, the 2016 attack connected “gender ideology” and Castro Chavismo paving the way for the full “demonization” of the left in the May 2018 elections. A few months later in Brazil, “gender as the other face of communism”, and vice-versa, floated freely in the dense electoral cyberspace itself, each of these elements feeding the imagination and emotional adherence of distinct groups of potential voters. While “gender” provided a glue to articulate all forms of sexual and moral corruption, “communism” operated as an open signifier of all “political bad things” that, in the views of these voters, would be rapidly swept away by the magic spell of the Christian inspired but also free-market and individualistic oriented Bolsonaro political agenda.
Postscript
Much water has flown under the bridge since this essay was published in November 2018. While it is not possible to offer a detailed update of the Brazilian new government some key features of this new era can be tracked. It is not at all trivial that in his inaugural speech, the newly elected president declared a fierce “combat against gender ideology” nor that three of his ministers glaringly share his vision and goal.
A new structure has been established merging the previous Secretaries of Human Rights, Women’s Policies an Racial Equality that now also incçudes a a priority focus on “the family”. The minister is female evangelical pastor who immediately announced her plan to make Brazil a country “free from abortion” and quickly became internationally known for declaring that girls must dress pink and boys blue. The minister of Education was a Colombian who acquired Brazilian citizenship with strong connections with the ultra-Catholic camp and immediately stated his priority to “de-ideologize” the public educational system of both Marxism and “gender”. Yet more poignantly the new Minister of Foreign Affairs has made clear that Brazilian international policies would pursue an “anti-globalization and Judeo-Christian” perspective in which combating “gender ideology” is also a priority.
This means that, in sharp contrast with what has been said by a large number of mainstream observers, the visceral repudiation of “gender” was not merely campaign rhetoric. Rather it immediately became a core component of the Bolsonaro governance agenda, even when the convictions of the president and of these three ministers may not be shared by all members of the new administration. Even so, “gender” is now at the center of the national political stage. Through a tortuous and disastrous path, gender, sexuality, and abortion matters have ceased to be the sideline topics they have been in the course of the last three decades. In March, 2019, to properly grasp how the Brazilian democratic cycle that began in the 1980s has been eroded and will continue to be eroded it is vital to name and understand the systemic meaning of “gender”. Most principally, perhaps, resisting the fierce attack on “gender” waged by the ultra-right that has taken over power will be a crucial task in the struggles ahead to preserve democracy.
Notes:
[1] Re-exist is a re-signification of the word resist. It was aired in social networks in the last two weeks and his invention is attributed to the theater director José Celso Martinez Corrêa, who has bravely resisted the military dictatorship.
[2] Members of the Socialist Party in France, grass- root left-wing groups in Italy and the ex-President Rafael Correa who was the first high level politician to publicly attack “gender ideology” in 2013 in the weekly TV program where he had direct interactions with the audience.
*This article was originally published on LSE blog Engenderings and it derives from a larger essay published by SPW on November, right after Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidential elections.
