Gênero na polarização: análise discursiva sobre os antagonismos midiatizados a partir de embates no Twitter

Abstract

This research examines how the currently majority discourses about gender, the neoconservative and the liberal identity discourse, organize the discursive field in the context of political polarization that settled down after the election of Jair Bolsonaro. From this perspective, this project sought to understand how each discourse is constructed and how they relate to each other without disregarding the existence of an asymmetry resulting from antidemocratic premises of neoconservatism. By analyzing two clashes on Twitter that involved gender, selected from their prominence in Trending Topics and their circulation between on and offline media, we examine how polarization happens concretely and how mediatized antagonisms trigger elements of the majority discourses that we deal with. The objective is that we could understand how the constructions of these discourses on gender take place in the context of polarization, what are their impacts on broader political processes and what are the influences of social media and a hypermedia society in this context. As a theoretical and methodological support, we analyze the discourses based on the theory of Laclau and Mouffe (2015), the passionate paths based on the semiotics of the passions of Greimas (2014), and media circulation based on Mario Carlón (2020). The political reflections were mostly based on Mouffe’s (2015) studies about antagonisms and agonisms; Butler’s (2018; 2019) and Safatle’s (2019) studies about gender, identity and recognition; and the studies of Biroli, Machado and Vaggione (2020) about the relations between gender and democracy in Latin America. We work with the hypothesis that the neoconservative discourse operationalized by the extreme right gives the trigger for polarized clashes by establishing a logic of hatred towards the other that gains strength in social media, weakening a radical democratic perspective. Regarding the identity discourses that take positions antagonistic to the extremism of the right, despite maintaining a democratic search, they fail to propose an approach that escapes the polarized dynamics and that allows the formation of broader equivalences with other democratic sectors. We alternatively propose an articulation between democratic struggles that considers gender in a disidentitary way, through an antipredicative recognition (SAFATLE, 2019), a queer recognition