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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.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the editors of this Special Issue, Gisela Zaremberg and Constanza Tabbush, as well as Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Sam Cook, Ben Woolhead, and our anonymous reviewers for their accurate comments and suggestions. They had a significant role in shaping the scope and arguments of this final version. The authors thank the Brazilian scientific research agencies FAPERJ, CNPq, CAPES, and UERJ (Prociencia Grants).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Eurico is currently a member of the Patriota Party, representing the state of Pernambuco.
2 All quotations from Brazilian House members are from the session’s official audio transcript and have been translated by the authors (Câmara dos Deputados Citation2016).
3 “Laico”/“laicidade,” as the prevalent term in the Brazilian political tradition and current debates about the regulation of religious affairs, is semantically distinct from the English “secular”/“secularism.” The national meaning of “laicidade” and “Estado Laico,” closer to the French political tradition, defines the norm of separation of state and public affairs from the religious domain, thereby restricting religious matters to the private realm. However, to highlight the constructedness of the public/private divide (Scott Citation2018), we adopt here the term “secular” as descriptive of the separation of spiritual and worldly matters in social representations, the configurations of which may admit a variety of arrangements for the regulation of religious affairs via-à-vis the state (Montero Citation2015). We preserve the borrowing from French, “laïc”/“laïcité,” when we refer to national invocations of that norm.
4 A House representative for the state of Rio de Janeiro with the Social Christian Party (PSC) at the time, in 2018 Bolsonaro was elected President of the Republic on a Social Liberal Party (PSL) ticket.
5 “They lost in 1964. They lose now in 2016. For the family and the innocence of schoolchildren, that the PT [Workers’ Party] never had … Against Communism, for our freedom, against the Folha de São Paulo [newspaper] and in memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, Dilma Rousseff’s greatest fear” (Câmara dos Deputados Citation2016).
6 Literally “campers,” landless rural workers and peasants protesting.
7 All quotations from Paraguayan House members are from the session’s official audio recording and have been transcribed and translated by the authors (Honorable Cámara de Diputados Citation2012).
8 Our reference to the term “religion” here is aimed at interpreting the scope of its meaning when uttered either as a category of accusation or when mobilized as an analytical category, in both cases by actors wary of its mingling with national politics. Asad (Citation2009, 53) critiques the understanding of religious symbols as conceptually separate objects whose “meanings can be established independently of the form of life in which they are used.” Therefore, “the possibility and authoritative status [of religious meanings, practices, and utterances] are to be explained as products of historically distinct disciplines and forces” (Asad Citation2009, 54). We thank one of our anonymous reviewers for pointing us to Asad’s felicitous framing of religion as a historical category.
9 For Miguel, Biroli, and Rayani (Citation2017, 251–252), “‘religious’ arguments have receded”; however, these authors interpret this change as “not incorporating the value of laïcité.”
10 In a seminal article, Vaggione (Citation2005) provided an insightful overview of this shift, which he called “strategic secularism,” in the political behavior of religious actors with regard to gender and sexual politics.
11 In comparison to the foundational role of Protestant immigration in the United States (US), in contemporary Brazil, the identity of evangélicos or crentes (Christian “believers”) is constructed in opposition to the default historical classification of Brazilian nationals as Catholic. Thus, “Evangelical” is an umbrella term encompassing all national Protestant denominations, from historic mission churches to autochthonous neo-Pentecostal ministries. Since the 1970s, self-identification as Catholic has decreased, replaced by the same proportion of declarations of Evangelicalism (Mariano Citation2004). Evangelicals have been discreetly present in national politics since the 1930s, but the number of politicians publicly identified as Evangelicals has grown steadily since the 1980s (Vital and Lopes Citation2013). We thank one of our anonymous reviewers for pointing us to that relevant comparison between US and Brazilian historical forms of religious pluralism.
12 We thank Carolina de Paula for sharing her vote chart for the Brazilian case in textual form. We cite Brazilian representatives by name, party, and state. The official records of the Paraguayan House sessions are available only as digital audio recordings; we listened to and selectively transcribed interventions and categorized them according to the assessments and predictions that they make, as well as by the presence of content inciting moral panics. We thank Christian Caje for his help with the translation of fragments originally in Guarani.
13 According to Connolly (Citation2011, 648), another important critic of secularism, secularist theories project “a world of politics in which controversial religious and existential orientations are bracketed from public discourse and political life.”
14 For a secularist interpretation of Brazilian House representatives’ invocations of God and family, see Miguel, Biroli, and Rayani (Citation2017). In a different vein, and inspired by Connolly, Burity (Citation2016) observes nuances in political behavior among Christian leaders, not restricted to right-wing discourses.
15 For more on the Paraguayan People’s Army (Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo, EPP), see Winer (Citation2017).
16 Note the distinction between “familism” and “familialism.” Our use of the former and of “familist” here denotes the multiple invocations of compulsory models of family, often by moral entrepreneurs, presuming and asserting “the heterosexually constituted family [as] the basic social unit” (Rich Citation1980, 657); the latter encompasses the critique of the privatized role of families and care policies in neoliberal regimes (see Brown Citation2015, 105–106).
17 For the appropriation (or lack thereof) of sexuality as an issue in the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, see Kaplan and Moran (Citation2001).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
José Szwako
José Szwako is a sociologist, Professor, and Prociencia Fellow at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ), Brazil. His main research interests are the tensions among conservative movements, feminisms, and the state, both in Brazil and Paraguay.
Horacio F. Sívori
Horacio F. Sívori is an anthropologist, Professor, Prociencia Fellow, and chair of the Latin American Center of Sexuality and Human Rights at the Institute of Social Medicine at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IMS-UERJ), Brazil. He does research on gender and sexual politics, LGBTQ+ activism, moral conservatism and backlash, digital feminisms, and online violence.