Anti-gender politics and moral panic in Brazil:

The extreme-right and the authoritarian turn in contemporary politics

Abstract

In 2018, the extreme right-wing deputy Jair Bolsonaro took by surprise the international public opinion by being elected president of the republic in Brazil. Using a racist, sexist, homophobic and antidemocratic rhetoric, Bolsonaro managed to articulate a broad conservative and extreme right front in his support. This article analyses one of the facets of this political articulation around the opposition to the expressions of sexuality dissonant of the heterosexual model. For this purpose, the concept of moral panic will be used to understand the mobilizations against the QueerMuseu exhibition opened to the public in August 2017. The article uses the Protest Event Analysis as a data collection methodology, in order to identify the social actors involved in the moral panic, their mobilization tactics, their justifying arguments, as well as the responses of civil society and the political class to the moral panic. The article aims to understand not only the relevance of gender and sexual diversity issues in the recent authoritarian advance in Brazil, but also to identify the potential and limits of the concept of moral panic as an analytical and empirical tool in sociology.