Abstract
ABSTRACT Brazilian democracy moves like a pendulum: from time to time its limits are expanded or retracted (Avritzer 2019). After a virulent dictatorial period, re-democratization was strengthened in the first decade of the 21st century. Public policies for the enfranchisement of the LGBT+ population were particularly important in this process. The rise of bolsonarism has been pushing the democratic pendulum back to its extreme opposite. This, however, does not go unchallenged. Against this backdrop, we analyze the online circulation of a poster for a lecture about a “transgender epidemic”, which was due to take place the Legislative Assembly of Porto Alegre in March 2020. Such textual disputes may help us reconceptualize the current state of Brazilian democracy as a friction between distinct scalar projects (Carr and Lempert, 2016). The textual trajectories we analyze suggest that the back and forth movement of democracy is not linear as Avritzer (2019) seems to assume. The illiberal retraction of recent years coexists with values forged in periods of democratic expansion, which explains the fact that the lecture was canceled due to online protests. Such resistance suggests that de-democratizing scalar projects are neither homogeneous nor totalizing, which allows new political collectivities to contest attempts to disenfranchise them.
Highlights
In a trenchant analysis of Brazilian politics, Avritzer (2019) expounds that democracy moves like a pendulum: from time to time its limits are expanded or retracted due to various sociohistorical changes
The textual itineraries we analyze suggest that the illiberal retraction of recent years coexists with values forged in periods of democratic expansion, which explains the fact that the lecture was canceled due to online and offline resistance
In an attempt to demonstrate how individuals zigzag through the current paradoxes of democracy, we investigate semiotic processes of scale-making in which gender and sexuality play a central role inshaping participation in the public realm
Summary
In a trenchant analysis of Brazilian politics, Avritzer (2019) expounds that democracy moves like a pendulum: from time to time its limits are expanded or retracted due to various sociohistorical changes. The rise of bolsonarism and the decline of democracy can only be fully grasped if we consider the changes in cisheteropatriarchal orders against the grain of dormant conservative values re-democratization temporarily forestalled This pattern finds resonance elsewhere since anti-genderism is instrumental to the global rise of right-wing extremism. Due to the recent affordances provided by re-democratization and the growing visibility and politicization of gender variance, trans people have managed to challenge biomedical views of their identities as pathological. Such views, though, have a long historical pedigree and institutional clout, which makes debunking them more difficult. The lecture would take place a few weeks after the FBM published the Resolution 2.265/2019, celebrated by trans advocates for its depathologizing stance
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