Covid-19, Homophobia and the Bolsonarista Vernacular: Hate Speech on Brazilian Social Media

Abstract

For the greater part of the 2010s and after the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2018, Brazilian social media became an increasingly fertile ground for the exercise of public violence associated with political campaigning, often marked by gender, sexuality, class and race. As political tension increased with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro openly disregarded and mocked scientific advice and showed contempt for expressions of care and empathy, which was consistent with the anti-intellectualism and gender script of his public persona.<br/> This article focusses on two episodes on Twitter and Instagram that illustrate varied forms of network engagement with instances of homophobic hate speech uttered by or attributed to Bolsonaro. On the one hand, we highlight how the amplification of homophobic speech as a political code was afforded by Twitter's design and algorithmic architecture. On the other hand, Instagram and Twitter also afforded the mobilisation of varied publics by means of memetic images in defence of public health and of sexual diversity, and in opposition to Bolsonaro's homophobia. In face of dehumanising acts and discourse, we interrogate the possibilities of feminist intersectional investments in digital media in times of adversity.