Hate speech in Brazil: new Think Tank in February!

The second edition of 2023 of the MyGender Think Tank is on February 8, at 14h30 (Lisbon time). The guest is professor Iara Beleli (Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero/Unicamp), who will explore the popularization of digital media in the acceleration of the participation of common subjects in Brazilian politics. The CO-PI of the MyGender project, Rita Basílio de Simões will do the mediation. The debate reflects on the agendas of the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights in the Bolsonaro government that circulated from the 2018 election campaign. In a moment marked by the horizontalization of productions, the news and the comments to them seem to be part of a process of amplification of hate discourses, most often intertwined with the national political context, associating social movements, especially feminists, to certain political parties. Particular attention is paid to the comments on this production which, even with distinct rhetoric, seem to suggest the need for a certain moral order, revealing a conservatism with regard to gender and sexuality issues. These discourses, permeated by the embarrassment of people and/or groups which defend human rights, less than argue, disqualify these subjects, by creating names – feminazis, communists – whose meanings do not refer to the historicisation of the movements but gain the status of an accusatory category. The research that gives rise to this lecture was carried out in Brazilian newspapers of wide circulation online, blogs and web pages.

Learn more about the guest:
Iara Beleli graduated in History(Unicamp), Master in History (PUC-SP), PhD in Social Sciences (Unicamp) with a post-doctorate at Universitat de Terragona (Spain), Post-doctorate at ISCTE-Iul (Lisbon). In the last 12 years, she has been working with Internet and social networks from the intersection of feminist, gender, socio-anthropological and communication theories, paying particular attention to how gender, is articulated with other categories of difference (race/ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, location, among others), cross the fields of investigation.