What are they doing right? Tweeting right-wing intersectionality in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Despite the contributions of intersectional approaches, the academic and political left is challenged by competing interests in class, gender, race, and other axes of inequality and power. The disconnect between research on political economy, on the one hand, and on culture and subjectivity, on the other, is stark in Latin American studies. In contrast, an emerging feature of the global radical right is the gathering of these dimensions in simultaneous attacks to different strands of progressive politics and scholarship. The enemy is defined in economic and cultural terms: thus, feminism is frequently referred to as an extension of communism while Marxism is understood as part of cultural conspiracies to destroy healthy families and normal lifestyles. We call this phenomenon right-wing intersectionality (RWI). Through a mixed-methods approach, the article explores how RWI manifests in 20 leading influencers, activists, and politicians. The research included the systematic content analysis of 30,858 tweets.

KEYWORDS:

• Right-wing politics
• Latin America
• Twitter
• intersectionality
• feminism

Acknowledgements

The theoretical framework of this research was presented by Paulo Ravecca at the ‘Pink tides, right turns in Latin America Seminar’ (Université du Québec en Outaouais, Gatineau, Quebec, June 2019) organized by Charmain Levy and Manuel Larrabure. More recent versions of the work were thoroughly debated at the faculty seminar of the Instituto de Ciencia Política (Universidad de la República, Montevideo, September 2020) as well as at the 2021 world congresses of the American Political Science Association, the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the International Public Policy Association, the International Political Science Association, and the Latin American Studies Association. We gratefully acknowledge the extensive and rich feedback and suggestions we received in these conversations. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive engagement with our research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We employ the notion of political narrative in the plain sense of a political perspective being articulated through language. We are aware of the complexity of the notion of narrative and of the recent explosion of narrative approaches within the social sciences (Ravecca & Dauphinee, 2018).

2 See also Combahee River Collective (2015), Coll Planas and Cruells (2013), Gunnarsson (2017), Henning (2015), Lugones (2008), McCall (2005), Nash (2017), Platero (2012), and Viveros Vigoya (2015).

3 As we will see the dual condition of being academic and activist is used by right-wing actors to criticize feminism and other critical approaches. An anonymous reviewer raised this relevant issue.

4 The blend is not entirely new and in fact RWI updates old attempts of depicting the women’s movements as a trojan horse for communism (Valobra, 2014).

5 This includes policy and legislative changes (Pérez Bentancur & Rocha-Carpiuc, 2020).

6 We thank an anonymous reviewer for making this relevant point.

7 Don't Mess with my Children has branches in different countries, see for example: https://conmishijosnotemetas.pe/; https://conmishijosnotemetas.com.ar/#!/-inicio/

8 Schools without Party: https://www.escolasempartido.org/

9 The role of the latter in the politics of the region seems to be increasing (Segado-Boj et al., 2015; Aruguete & Calvo, 2018).

10 We thank Mara Karina Silva for this clear and concise articulation of RWI. We also want to acknowledge Yesola Kweon for showing to us other potential definitions and approaches to the phenomenon.

11 On the relevance of emotions on contemporary political life, see Gioscia and Wences (2017).

12 Occasionally RWI narrates a patriarchal tale about women being fooled and used by the evil forces of communism, so vaguely defined that it includes international organizations and NGOs. After all, the story has to be about a struggle between men, even when women overflow the streets, build movements, and develop powerful theoretical interventions that advance critical theory.

13 Vaggione and Campos Machado (2020) propose the category of neoconservatism as an adept framework to understand the current landscape of conservative politics; we do not dispute the usefulness of the category, but we are interested in highlighting the intersectional character of such a landscape. See all contributions to Politics & Gender’s online symposium about the conservative backlash in Latin America (Biroli & Caminotti, 2020).

14 The book re-arranges or fabricates historical facts to match its script. It is populated by inaccurate interpretations of feminist and critical theory authors (amusingly, it quotes ‘Foucault for beginners’). It is poorly written, authors’ names are misspelled throughout the text, and citations and references are wrongly presented. The research is weak, and its sources are not reliable. The lack of well-crafted arguments is compensated by repeating the same ideas once and again in rhetorically formulaic ways.

15 The concept was originally coined to critically explore gendered dynamics, encompassing intersectional approaches (see Collins, 1990).

16 For a detailed analysis of the notion of gender ideology see Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo (2017) and Corredor (2019). In 1998 the Episcopal Conference of Peru published one of the first texts in Latin America that advocates for this ‘anti-gender’ perspective.

17 In this regard RWI incorporates and resembles the narratives of the American Alt-Right (Hawley, 2017; Woods, 2019).

18 Twitter is a platform for microblogging messages of up to 280 characters (called tweets) that allows the user to instantly share ideas, photos, or videos. It was launched on 13 July 2006 and, since then, has grown constantly: currently, it has 166 million daily users (The Washington Post, 2020). According to the latest We Are Social and Hootsuite Report (2020a), three Latin American countries are among the 20 with more Twitter penetration worldwide (Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina). The same report states that Twitter’s audience self-identifies predominantly as male (62%).

19 This resembles the experience of the American Alt-right (Hawley, 2018; Froio & Ganesh, 2018),

20 A lurker is someone who participates in a virtual community only in a receptive way.

21 A troll is someone who tries to provoke other users in a virtual community.

22 This linguistic compression brings to mind the concerns that philosopher Herbert Marcuse expressed decades ago about the generalized imposition of ‘a syntax in which the structure of the sentence is abridged and condensed in such way that no tension, no ‘space’ is left between the parts of the sentences’ (Marcuse, 1991, p. 86).

23 For the aggregated analysis, it was only possible to work with the accounts in the same language. We chose to show the Spanish graph because Spanish speakers were the majority of the sample.

24 This is because the expression ‘being in favor of abortion’ and ‘being in favor of life’ or ‘family’ are profusely used in the tweets under study.

25 Law 19.684 recognizes and protects transgender’s people rights.

26 This video in Spanish is very revealing in such regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gng8Z-DHg4

27 Laje’s influence is strong in Twitter and beyond. He was one of the main speakers of the second South American Congress for Life and Family.

28 This narrative strategy anchored in regret for a shameful past seems common among anti-feminist female leaders which is an interesting topic for future research.

29 For a description of Rosas’ relevance, see Iglesias (2018), Cariboni (2018) and Rousseau (2020). For an analysis on Don’t Mess with my Children and its role in the national campaign against the Ministry of Education’s new National Curricula for Basic Education in Peru, see Meneses (2019) and Rousseau (2020).

30 This is one of the links that can be mistaken because of the lexicon’s bias: the adjusted version of the graph reveals negative emotions.

31 In fact, Fujimorism baked the mobilization against the inclusion of ‘gender’ in basic education (Meneses, 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paulo Ravecca

Paulo Ravecca works at the Department of Political Science at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay. His research focus includes epistemology and the history of political science; the intersections between critical theories (queer, neo-marxist, postcolonial, and poststructural approaches); political economy and international relations; and gender and sexuality. He is the current editor of the Journal of Narrative Politics and the author of The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences (Routledge 2019).

Marcela Schenck

Marcela Schenck works at the Institute of Health Psychology at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay. Her research focus includes gender, sexual and gender diversity, and public policy. Marcela has published in English, Spanish and Portuguese on issues related to her research interests.

Bruno Fonseca

Bruno Fonseca works at the Department of Research and Educational Statistics of the National Administration of Public Education, Uruguay. He is a statistics analyst specialized on education and demographic policies.

Diego Forteza

Diego Forteza works at the National Institute of Educational Evaluation, Uruguay. He is a data scientist specialized on education and health policies.