Performing family in Fernando Lugo’s and Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment processes, Paraguay 2012 and Brazil 2016

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a contribution to current efforts to meet the political and theoretical challenges that contemporary moral conservatism poses to feminisms. In Paraguay and Brazil, observers are often perplexed by the all-too-common invocations, by Christian politicians, of sacred entities as indisputable grounds for acts of government. Such invocations are often regarded as deviations from laïcité as a founding principle of the national liberal democratic tradition and a symbol of modernity. We revisit recent critical events in order to take issue with the theoretical and political assessment of “conservative” moral values and representations as predominantly “religious.” As turning points in national politics, saturated with symbolism and emotional overtones, the congressional deliberations leading to the impeachments of Fernando Lugo and Dilma Rousseff were easily read in a characteristically secularist key. In our analysis of the discourse of legislators, we address the role of family tropes and the production of moral panics as expressive of a specific moral grammar. We discuss the discursive construction of the family as a sacred entity and focus on the gendered national order performed in these events.