The Brazilian Feminist Spring: Discourse and Intersectionality in the 2018 Presidential Election

Discourse and Intersectionality: Theoretical Positions

From the outset of his campaign in 2018, Bolsonaro positioned himself as an antiestablishment candidate, one who would be able to end corruption in the country and represent the so-called upright citizen through the defense of conservative ideals. Some of the allegations he made during his campaign were that there was a communist threat in the country that needed to be extinguished and that he would eliminate the so-called gender ideology ⁵ from the country's schools while promoting the valorization of the heterosexual family, Christian religious values, and pride in being a patriot. Thus, by reviving one of the slogans of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship ("God, homeland, family"), Bolsonaro's campaign was structured around characteristic populist discursive mechanisms based on the false promise of overcoming the current state of affairs, relegating to this newly elected the role of savior of the nation from the clutches of a politics incapable of providing an adequate response to the aspirations of the population (Laclau, 2005).

As a solution to the alleged communist threat, Bolsonaro also presented as a campaign promise the advancement of neoliberal economic policies in Brazil to be carried out by his minister of the economy, Paulo Guedes—a well-known neoliberal economist whose participation in Bolsonaro’s campaign events was capable of boosting support from the country’s business sectors. ⁶ In this context, Bolsonaro’s campaign events represented the materialization of a conservative moral project through which neoliberalism established its social contours—a phenomenon that has been widely studied in the North American context by Brown (2019) and in the Latin American one by Biroli, Machado, and Vaggione (2020).

By portraying himself as the bearer of “the truth” capable of rescuing his people, then, Bolsonaro emerged from that very binomial: conservative-neoliberal. Nevertheless, one of the questions that remain unanswered is how this "truth" managed to mobilize the Brazilian population and secure Bolsonaro's victory in 2018. Put in another way, how could a socio-economic-moral project that expropriated the rights of the working class persuade the Brazilian population—especially women—to choose it? Before delving into that question through an analysis of Bolsonaro's campaign activities, I would like to articulate certain fundamental theoretical assumptions that will underpin and shape my analysis. In this connection, it is worth considering Michel Foucault's thoughts on the relationship between power and truth in contemporary times. In an interview published in 1977, Foucault (1980: 131) said,

Truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power. . . .Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Foucault's concept of "regimes of truth" encompasses the social and cultural structures that oversee the production and dissemination of knowledge and truth claims in a given society. A regime of truth consists of a distinct set of assumptions, values, and practices that establish what qualifies as "truth" and how it is legitimized and reproduced by subjects through processes that may operate without explicit awareness. In proposing that each society has its regimes of truth, Foucault argues that our relationship with truth is never direct but always mediated by power relations. ⁷ Power relations determine what counts as truth and establish its regimes or politics. In this way, regimes of truth are constructed through disputes over consensus mediated by power relations. By mobilizing the Foucauldian concept of regimes of truth for this study, my aim is to underscore that disputes around the signifier "woman" were fundamental to the succession of events that culminated in Bolsonaro’s election.

As we have seen, Bolsonaro's election victory was not always a foregone conclusion. Prior to being elected, he faced some obstacles, including a large number of undecided women voters that led to the largest feminist protest in the country's history, #EleNão. However, despite these protests, the "truth" purported by Bolsonaro was able to convince a portion of the female electorate that he was the best choice for president. In these terms, I ask: which regimes of truth were at play in effectively persuading these women to cast their votes in his favor?

According to a survey conducted by a research group of the Universidade de São Paulo, #EleNão was a movement primarily made up of white, socially privileged, left-wing voters. ⁸ This lack of diversity has led some to criticize the Brazilian feminist movement for not being inclusive of less privileged groups and for being a white feminist movement that was unable to work at intersections. In light of this criticism, it is necessary to ask on behalf of which women #EleNão proclaimed itself a feminist movement. Furthermore, an important issue to consider when examining the functioning of regimes of truth related to the signifier “woman” in the 2018 elections is the identification of the women who indicated indecision about their voting choices.

To fully explore and engage with the complexities of the questions at hand, intersectional feminist thought is crucial. In a country like Brazil, where an alarmingly large number of cisgender women and trans and gender-diverse individuals is murdered each year, it is clear that gender remains a useful category for historical analysis (Scott, 1986). Nevertheless, as previously noted by Davis (1981) and Gonzalez (1984), failing to account for intersectionality can impose significant limitations on both academic analysis and activist efforts. As exemplified by the #EleNão movement, the absence of an intersectional lens prevented a comprehensive representation of women's experiences at diverse intersections, one that could serve as a reminder of the crucial role that the consideration of multiple dimensions of identity-difference plays in feminist activism.

This study refrains from conceptualizing gender, sexuality, race, class, and religion as immutable categories. Instead, it acknowledges that such markers of identity-difference are actively produced in power relations. As pointed out by Collins (2019: 46), power is at the core of intersectionality’s critical inquiry:

Intersecting power relations produce social divisions of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, age, country of origin, and citizenship status that are unlikely to be adequately understood in isolation from one another. Non-intersectional scholarship assumes that race, class, and gender are unconnected variables or features of social organization that can be studied as singular phenomena—for example, gender or race as discrete aspects of individual identity or patriarchy or racism as mono-categorial systems of power. Intersectionality posits that systems of power co-produce one another in ways that reproduce both unequal material outcomes and the distinctive social experiences that characterize people’s experiences within social hierarchies.

Through the lens of discourse analysis and intersectionality, I seek to highlight the critical role of language in shaping representations related to the concept of womanhood and to explore how Bolsonaro’s campaign was able to mobilize the regimes of truth around the signifier “woman” for his political gain. In doing so, my objective is to highlight that the 2018 elections provide an example of how disputes over consensus around the signifier “woman” occurred by mobilizing certain regimes of truth that promoted specific ideals regarding the category of women that cannot be understood without taking into account gender, race, class, and religiosity. The main argument is that Bolsonaro's campaign was able to convince undecided female voters by promoting a discourse that emphasized white masculinity and religiosity. Conversely, the Brazilian feminist movement's inability to embrace diverse women's experiences was partly due to its reliance on a discourse of “feminist whiteness” ⁹ (Lépinard, 2019).

To this end, this study considers intersectionality not merely as a concept but rather as a critical social theory (Collins, 2019) that seeks to offer a theoretical-methodological framework for understanding the structural interdependence of racism, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy (Akotirene, 2019). Apprehending intersectionality as a critical social theory entails that it function not simply as a contemplation of the experiences of marginalized communities but rather as praxis, challenging dominant epistemologies that sustain and reinforce structural forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and classism not only in academic spheres but across diverse discursive practices (Collins, 2019).

Corpus Constitution and Analysis

This study adopts a qualitative-interpretive approach, and corpus constitution is here based on Courtine’s (2014: 115, my translation) premise that a discursive corpus exhibits a dynamic mode of operation:

This conception will not consider a discursive corpus as a closed set of data that emerges from a certain organization; instead, it will make the discursive corpus an open set of articulations whose construction is not performed at the initial state of the analysis procedure: here, a discourse analysis procedure will be conceived as a regulated questioning of discourse data that foresees the successive steps of work on corpora throughout the entire procedure. This implies that the construction of a discursive corpus can perfectly be completed only at the end of the procedure.

Adopting a stance that disregards the passive and isolated nature of the corpus as fixed also means acknowledging that it is not simply waiting to be collected but constituted as the analytical procedures unfold. In this context, the very selection of the discursive sequences is part of the analytical process.

Analyzing discursive sequences involves looking at the relationships between different discourse units and how they work together to produce meaning. This requires a focus on the linguistic-discursive elements that link these units and shape their organization in power relations. Thus discourse is taken not only as individual texts or utterances but also as practices (Foucault, 1971). Discursive sequences are not limited to a single text but can involve multiple images and texts (oral and written) that are related to each other and work together to produce meaning.

The discursive sequences analyzed in this study were selected from three different moments of the 2018 runoff events. The first moment is centered on the last televised debate in which Bolsonaro participated. The second pertains to the #EleNão and #EleSim protests, while the third explores a song that gained significant popularity as election day approached. These sequences were chosen because, from my perspective, they represent the way certain regimes of truth surrounding gender, race, class, and religion were mobilized by Bolsonaro's campaign. Each was subjected to an examination that considered both intradiscursive and interdiscursive dimensions—the intradiscursive pertaining to the enunciation level of discourse and the interdiscursive to the level of discursive memory. ¹⁰ The linguistic components of statements are examined along with the enunciative context, which is analyzed in light of the social-historical events evoked by the discursive-linguistic corpus’s materiality. In other words, the analysis of the discursive sequences takes into account both the linguistic and contextual dimensions of the statements. In doing so the aim was to raise questions concerning the ways in which language is used to construct certain regimes of truth and to examine the relationships between stability and change, conformity and diversity, and repetition and differentiation in discourse—in other words (Foucault, 1971: 31), trying to

grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence.. determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statements it excludes. We do not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another discourse; we must show why it could not be other than it was.

The work of discourse analysis, then, is not uncovering supposed covert meanings or intentions but rather questioning the underlying conditions that allow for the production of such statements within the selected discursive sequences. Through a critical examination of the enunciative practices and discursive strategies involved in the production of statements, the goal is to call into question the relationships between language, power, and society. Drawing upon the fields of discourse analysis and intersectionality, this research adopts an interdisciplinary framework that considers the interplay between various systems of power and their impact on the (re)production and reception of discourse.

Intersectional Wars: What Does It Mean to Be a Woman?

During the official election campaign period, Bolsonaro participated in only two television debates alongside other presidential candidates. On September 6, he was stabbed at a campaign rally, which led to surgery and precluded his participation in any further debates. Prior to this incident, the candidate had already expressed his intent not to engage in further discussions with his opponents. This strategy was interpreted as a response to criticism of his poor performance during interviews and confrontations with opponents. In the two debates in which he participated, it was clear that Bolsonaro lacked training, articulateness, and even knowledge on crucial issues such as the economy, foreign policy, and education. When cornered by journalists, the politician admitted his lack of knowledge on certain topics. When rebuffed by media professionals who portrayed him as unqualified, he responded to criticism by admitting it and asserting that he saw no issue with his lack of preparation.

The corpus analysis presented an extract from a translated transcript taken from the debate in which the presidential candidate participated. During this point in the debate, Bolsonaro was called upon to pose a question to one of his opponents, in this case, Marina Silva, the presidential candidate for the Partido Rede (Rede Party). Discursive Sequence 1, from a debate broadcast by Rede TV on August 17, 2018, is as follows:

Bolsonaro engages in a rhetorical strategy to address his weapons agenda by questioning Silva's position on the issue. At the time, it was well known that Marina Silva was not a proponent of population weapons policies. In response to Bolsonaro's question, Silva denies support for this agenda and reframes the discussion in terms of gender equality, specifically the gender pay gap. She references a previous statement made by Bolsonaro and argues that only someone who is not fully aware of the experiences and struggles of women could make such a statement. Given that Silva is a black evangelical woman, Bolsonaro then points to a supposed inconsistency in the evangelical-woman discursive formation, suggesting that it is impossible to simultaneously hold such religious beliefs and support agendas related to the decriminalization of abortion and the use of marijuana. Although Silva has never publicly supported these issues, Bolsonaro's speech seeks to discredit her image as both a woman and an evangelical by associating her with leftist movements. In his attempt to disqualify Silva, he claims that she does not understand the experiences of women. In doing so, he positions himself as an advocate for women's rights, referencing his campaign promise of chemical castration for rapists.

What draws my attention to the confrontation between Silva and Bolsonaro is how representations of women have emerged as a central issue. Silva’s speech portrays women as empowered individuals in the job market who have achieved a degree of social emancipation, whereas Bolsonaro’s represents women as religious/evangelicals, mothers of drug addicts, or victims of sexual violence. When Silva attempts to interrupt him to address the gender pay gap, Bolsonaro is discourteous, repeatedly telling her she cannot interrupt and ultimately redirecting the conversation back to the topic of armed citizens. He argues that a "good and prepared woman" should have the right to own a weapon for self-defense. By assigning attributes such as "good" and "prepared" to the image of a woman, his statements create a distinction between women who fit such an ideal and those who do not, implying that not all women are deserving of representation. Furthermore, Bolsonaro's avoidance of Silva's question regarding the gender pay gap and his emphasis on women as religious figures, mothers, and victims of domestic violence perpetuates a portrayal of women as passive objects in need of individual protection, thus silencing the role of the state in providing them effective protection. Bolsonaro positions himself as the defender of these "good women," playing into the “performativity of gender” (Butler, 1990) tied to conservative discourses that reinforce traditional gender roles, with men cast as protectors and women relegated to subordinate positions in society.

Interestingly, instead of challenging the representations introduced by Bolsonaro, Silva herself adopts similar depictions of women as being primarily associated with the role of mother and religious figure. Despite her statement that Brazil is a secular state, Silva appeals to religious references and bible verses in her response, further perpetuating the notion that women's place is limited to religious or mothering roles. By suggesting that women are responsible for educating men, Silva's argument reinforces, in a way, the representation of women as passive and lacking agency. This could serve to reinforce rather than subvert the patriarchal societal norms and expectations surrounding women's roles and representation. Thus Silva misses an excellent opportunity to address the indecisive women from an intersectional perspective. In other words, by engaging in rhetoric that solely focuses on character assassination of Bolsonaro, Silva fails to seize the opportunity to explore the lack of concrete proposals for working women, especially evangelical ones.

In this sense, if we consider that at the time what was at stake was the decision-making power of the women's vote, which already represents the majority of Brazilians, and that, furthermore, evangelicals constitute a third of the population (Spyer, 2020), this point of the debate between Silva and Bolsonaro addresses precisely those whose vote the candidates needed to win: evangelical women. This reveals important issues related to the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and religion that had been, until then, ignored by the Brazilian left.

As pointed out by Spyer (2020), even though Brazil is still considered a Catholic country and there are many Afro-Brazilian religions here, since the 1970s a vertiginous drop has been perceived in the number of Catholic religious, while the number of evangelicals, mostly black people, has increased. Given this context, Spyer (2020: 23–24, my translation) notes that, in Brazil,

evangelical churches function as an informal welfare state occupying spaces abandoned by the Public Power. Since the massive migration of poor Northeasterners to the cities began, in the mid-20th century, in these "shantytowns" the churches provide everything from emotional comfort, money in difficult times, access to jobs, consultations with health professionals, meetings with lawyers or with representatives of the Public Power, to openings at rehabilitation facilities.

In the second round of the election, Bolsonaro received the majority of the evangelical votes (68 percent), and, according to many analysts, including Spyer (2020), it was precisely the evangelical vote that gave him the victory in the presidential race. After reexamining this moment in the debate, it becomes evident that Silva failed to address the gender pay gap issue from an intersectional standpoint—once she could have emphasized, for example, that evangelical women prioritize dignified working conditions over obtaining a gun license. When she did not do so, Bolsonaro was able to capitalize on this oversight and appeal to the group of voters he was seeking to win over by activating, in his speech, social markers such as gender, motherhood, and religion, albeit in an ultraconservative manner. By activating these markers of identity, Bolsonaro silenced others, such as social class and race, that are crucial for comprehending the multifaceted nature of inequalities in Brazil. This silencing gesture materializes one of the discursive strategies of neoliberal rationality (Foucault, 2003), which through a neoconservative grammar operates and perpetuates inequalities (Brown, 2019; Biroli, Machado, and Vaggione, 2020). This discussion is intended not to criticize Silva's performance but to highlight the discursive strategies employed during the electoral campaign to establish regimes of truth regarding the representations of womanhood in the neoliberal-conservative Brazilian context.

Discursive Sequence 2 consists of two campaign posters, an #EleNão poster reading “A woman of self-respect does not vote for a disturbed individual like Bolsonaro” and an #EleSim poster reading “I am a woman. I am black. I will vote for Bolsonaro. I am 78 years old.” ¹²

These contrasting narratives materialized the regimes of truth that defined the 2018 presidential election regarding the intersectional question at hand. Most protesters in the #EleNão movement were white, privileged, and left-wing voters. The inability of the movement to engage with a wider audience and promote identification among women who were undecided in their votes has been attributed to a variety of factors, among them the economic one explored by Barros and Silva (2019). Others argue that the movement reinforced a growing hatred toward the Brazilian left and failed to establish dialogues with other social segments. However, aligned with the analysis of Karklin—one of the organizers of the protests in São Paulo—I understand that blaming women for Bolsonaro's election is inaccurate and counterproductive. Moreover, I endorse the thesis that the representation of the feminist movement within the Brazilian imaginary, which was effectively exploited by Bolsonaro’s campaign, may also have played a defining role in the #EleNão movement's lack of success in connecting with other women., as we shall see in Discursive Sequence 3, a song called “Proibidão do Bolsonaro”;

He came hot and today he is heating up.

He came hot and today he is heating up.

Want to challenge? I don’t understand.

To vote for Bolsonaro, my hand is already shaking.

I give the CUT bread with mortadella

And for feminists, ration in the bowl.

The right-wing girls are the top, more beautiful,

While the left-wing ones have more hair than bitches.

Bolsonaro jumps with a parachute,

Bolsonaro, reserve captain.

And Bolsonaro married Cinderella

While Jean Wyllys was just watching a soap opera.

Maria do Rosario doesn't know how to wash a pan.

Jandira Feghali never lived in a favela.

Luciana Gero supports the landless

But doesn't give the address so they can invade her house. . . . ¹³

In the aftermath of the #EleNão protests, a funk artist named MC Reaça released a parody of a well-known Brazilian funk song called "Baile de favela," which was renamed "Proibidão do Bolsonaro". The song became an anthem for demonstrations by Bolsonaro's supporters, which reinforced gender stereotypes through “controlling images” (Collins, 2002). The song’s lyrics and video, widely shared through digital platforms, falsely portrayed feminists who took part in #EleNão protests as aggressive, naked women and right-wing women as attractive, white/blonde women dressed in military/navy uniforms. Furthermore, its lyrics also discredit the image of prominent figures on the Brazilian left, including Paulo Freire, Maria do Rosario, Jandhira Fegalli, and Manuela D'Ávila.

The 2018 election in Brazil was also marked by the widespread dissemination of disinformation via mobile messaging apps, which also resulted in a significant challenge for mapping the corpus of this study. Bolsonarism employed a similar campaign strategy to that of Trumpism, which involved the production and sharing of pieces of disinformation. Within messaging apps groups formed by Bolsonaro supporters, false images related to the #EleNão movement were shared. ¹⁴ These images portrayed misrepresented numbers of participants and used pictures taken during other protests or Carnival events in Rio de Janeiro as if they had been taken during the #EleNão street protests. Moreover, manipulated images depicting naked women vandalizing Catholic saints’ statues were also shared and falsely attributed to the movement and to feminism in general.

As Collins (2002) points out, stereotypes are not just images or generalizations but are used to justify the mistreatment of marginalized people—especially black women—and to reify them as inferior. The depiction of women in the song's lyrics and music video embodies the concept of controlling images put forth by Collins, as it serves “to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life” (2002: 69). Having said that, it appears that to some extent the success of the discursive strategy adopted by Bolsonaro's campaign in attracting the votes of women may not be considered highly disruptive, given that it is grounded in the colonial practices that constitute and evoke discursive memory. However, the analysis of the three discursive sequences presented here suggests that the pivotal aspect was the way by which these “controlling images” were mobilized by the far-right in terms of the use of digital platforms for spreading misinformation and inducing moral panic and, to a certain extent, reinforced by the left, as the latter failed to provide an effective proposal for encompassing the needs of black, evangelical, and working-class women in particular.

Conclusion

Since 2018, Bolsonaro's ascent to power and Bolsonarism as a political phenomenon have been extensively studied from various perspectives. They include changes in the political scenario since the June 2013 protests (Nobre, 2022; Nunes, 2022), the relationship between truth and digital populism (Cesarino, 2022), and the advance of inequalities as neoliberal-conservative projects gained room in Latin America (Biroli, Machado, and Vaggione, 2020). In this study I have sought to approach Bolsonaro's rise to power from the perspective of the regimes of truth around the signifier “woman” that were mobilized during the 2018 campaign to persuade undecided women to elect him as their representative. By discussing the historical disruption in the disparity of voting intention between men and women and the effects of the feminist spring in 2018 (#EleNão), I have aimed to underscore the importance and urgency of intersectional analysis for better understanding of the regimes of truth at play in the Brazilian political context.

As I have tried to demonstrate, by linguistically mobilizing, during his campaign, markers of identity-difference that associate the signifier “woman” with attributes related to motherhood, religiosity, and beauty, other crucial markers for the discussion of addressing inequality reduction in Brazil, such as gender, race, and social class, were silenced. This discursive strategy materialized the regimes of truth that consolidate the neoliberal-conservative project on which their undertaking is based. In this sense, the “truth” Bolsonaro purported to promote is rooted not in the principles espoused in John's verse ¹⁵ as he has often claimed but in this paradoxical connection between conservative and neoliberal discourses, a transnational phenomenon that has been studied by a variety of aforementioned scholars, such as Brown (2019) and Biroli, Machado, and Vaggione (2020). Therefore, the ultimate goal of such “truth” is to further entrench and consolidate the conservative-neoliberal rationale.

Furthermore, drawing on the pivotal role of the evangelical vote in securing Bolsonaro's presidential victory in 2018 (Spyer, 2020), particularly with the majority of female voters who had initially planned to nullify their votes, this paper contends that the feminist spring's inability to hamper Bolsonaro's campaign can be attributed to two principal factors. The first is the challenge of countering the various pieces of misinformation disseminated by Bolsonarist groups about feminism, which depicted the feminist movement as a group of women who disrespected religious symbols, thereby positioning feminists as unworthy of respect and lacking in credibility. The second is #EleNão's failure to work across intersections and mobilize women from diverse backgrounds, such as black, evangelical, and working-class women. Even though this shortcoming could be viewed as a direct result of the first factor, it is important to note that, despite its primary objectives, #EleNão failed to challenge the regimes of truth around the signifier “woman” because it universalized the experiences of Brazilian women, as if white and socially privileged women represented the entire group. Therefore, while #EleNão failed to challenge the regimes of truth promoted by Bolsonaro's campaign, which reinforced stereotypes of women as religious, maternal, and beautiful figures, the movement itself also contributed to the regimes of truth posited by whiteness. All things considered, so long as feminist movements remain uncapable of questioning forms of hegemony—including their own—and working at intersections, the controlling images around the signifier “woman” perpetuated by the regimes of truth promoted by the far-right winter will thrive.