Scaling and indexing sexual anxiety in the Brazilian contemporary extreme right

A projeção escalar e a indexicalização da ansiedade sexual na extrema direita brasileira contemporânea

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the contemporary phenomenon of the extreme right and argue that it involves the friction between the chronotopes of Colonial Modernity and those of the libertarian forces from the 1960s and 1970s. We also emphasize that this phenomenon can also be understood as social fascism. This chronotopic confrontation, which centrally includes social networks and voracious capitalism, is the effect of biopower and the tactical productivity of discourses on sexuality. In particular, we focus on how this friction strategically operated in the Discourses of former president Bolsonaro, producing sexual anxiety, fear and insecurity. The analysis is based on the constructs of sociolinguistic scale and indexicality. We examined re-entextualizations of the then-president's Discourses on social media, which uniquely in the international extreme right focused on ‘scandalous’ sexual acts, his penis, and his sexual performance. In conclusion, we emphasize: a) the need to pay attention to micro-political aspects of subjectivity that make macro-politics operational; and b) the relevance of an epistemology that involves political activism, such as the semiotic studies undertaken here, in order to open up space for another future.

Keywords:
chronotopes ; social fascism ; Bolsonaro ; scale ; indexicality

Resumo

Neste artigo, discutimos o fenômeno contemporâneo da extrema direita e argumentamos que ela envolve o atrito entre cronotopos da Modernidade Colonial e aqueles de forças libertárias dos anos 60 e 70. Enfatizamos ainda que esse fenômeno pode ser também compreendido como fascismo social. Uma tal confrontação cronotópica, que inclui fundamentalmente as redes sociais assim como um capitalismo voraz, é efeito do biopoder e da produtividade tática dos discursos sobre a sexualidade. Em particular, focalizamos como tal atrito operou estrategicamente nos discursos do ex-presidente Bolsonaro, produzindo ansiedade sexual, pavor e insegurança. A análise baseia-se nos construtos de escala sociolinguística e indexicalidade. Examinamos re-entextualizações de falas do então presidente na mídia social cujo foco está colocado, de modo único na extrema direita internacional, em atos sexuais ‘escandalosos’, seu pênis, e seu desempenho sexual. Em conclusão, acentuamos: a) a necessidade de se ter atenção a aspectos micropolíticos da subjetividade que tornam a macropolítica operacional; e b) a relevância de uma epistemologia que envolva ativismo político, como a dos estudos semióticos aqui empreendidos, de maneira a abrir espaço para um outro futuro.

Palavras-chave:
cronotopos ; fascismo social ; Bolsonaro ; escala ; indexicalidade

1. Sexual anxiety in contemporary politics

In 2019, around the Carnival period in Brazil, we came across a cartoon by Matheus Ribs, a political scientist and artist who describes himself as an illustrator of the national political struggle and the colonial violence in the country’s everyday life¹. The cartoon drew our attention for the heterogeneous signs it gathered together, associating politics, fascist references, body fluids and male genitalia. In it, Jair Bolsonaro stands next to the map of Brazil, holding his penis and urinating on the country. He wears a dark suit and the Nazi swastika armband on his left arm. His facial expression and clenched teeth suggest anger or great irritation. In place of his sexual organ is the logo of a well-known social platform, a blue bird. A yellow liquid comes out of its beak towards the map. Despite splashes in various directions, it hits the area where Brasilia, the federal capital is located. The green color of the tie and of the Brazilian map links the male participant to the center of presidential power.

Figure 1:
Cartoon by Matheus Ribs²

The cartoon circulated widely in different media environments. Following anthropological accounts of how resources move across scales and forge images of personhood (Agha, 2007; Wortham, 2005), we started to track the textual chain the cartoon integrated (YouTube videos, posts on social platforms and online newspapers). In the corpus we generated sexuality continually crept into Bolsonaro’s discourse. This recurrence encouraged us to partially reconstruct the sociohistorical conjuncture that enhanced the circulation of sexual Discourses³ in contemporary politics and the scalar work it performed in the characterization of the presidential persona.

Many are the authors (Moita-Lopes & Pinto, 2020; Stanley, 2018; Karmy, 2016, Eco, 1997/2018, for example) who have taken the incitement of sexual anxiety as a traditional feature of fascism or perhaps of social fascism (Santos, 2016), a phenomenon different from historical fascism, normally associated with the fascist regimes of the 20th century in Germany, Italy, or Spain. Roughly speaking, social fascism refers to a process of subjectivation based on a prejudiced stance that denies otherness and belittles difference. Santos (2016) has argued that social fascism is typical of ‘low-intense democracies’ such as faced in Brazil from the 2019 to 2022, during Bolsonaro’s government.

Against this background, the purpose of this paper is three-fold: 1) to understand semiotic features of the Brazilian contemporary political scenario, in which the extreme right plays an important role; 2) to reflect on how the former Brazilian president, Bolsonaro, and part of the governmental cabinet, indexically mobilize sexuality Discourses; and 3) to analyze their scalar claims in that regard.

Methodologically, we have followed the text trajectory (Blommaert 2005; Fabrício, 2015/2018) of particular tweets and speeches - texts - by Bolsonaro and people around him. Our purpose is to analyze the textual production by or about him on social media with a focus on his recurrent appeals to gender and sexuality and the ‘identity’ patterns they project.

As a first analytical move we set out to trace connections and associations (Latour, 2005) to help us distinguish the specific political domain of sexual anxiety. We understand this procedure as a scalar maneuver that directed our attention as we worked our way through the data.

2. Resorting to sociolinguistic scales

Scaling is a practice that has to do with signification processes and the social meanings they forge (Fabrício, 2020; Fabrício & Moita-Lopes, 2020, 2021; Moita-Lopes, 2020). According to Carr and Lempert (2016, p. 3), we scale our worlds because “we are uniquely endowed with the power of perspective”. This fact allows us to construct a point of view through the deployment of different signs - linguistic, gestural and imagistic, among others. The construct thus refers to human’s semiotic form of life. When we scale, “we orient, compare, connect, and position ourselves.” (Carr & Lempert 2016, p. 3) These activities are not free-floating. They orient to a specific ideological order, mobilizing sociohistorical Discourses and standardized patterns of normality and deviance.

Gal and Irvine (2019, p. 218) on their turn draw attention to how scales account for a process of meaning projection which is quite distant from traditional binary systems. This is so because what is involved in scale projections is not to account for a previously given dimension but for how such dimensions are elaborated through semiotic labor. This is the reason why these two authors argue that “scales are made, not found” (2018, p. 17). The underlying linguistic ideology is that language does not reflect the social world. Rather, the social world one is familiar with does not exist prior to the discursive-semiotic scales which fabricate it. Such scales create meanings about who we are, about what we are doing, with whom, where, when and what for. That is to say that what we term ‘ontological reality’ is inseparable from the ways we assemble signs and the meaning effects they produce.

Semiotic labour relies on how wide sociocultural repertoires are indexed by the different signs in use. The indexical value of signs lies in their capacity to point simultaneously to local and translocal meanings (Agha, 2007; Blommaert, 2015, 2006). Therefore, signs in use position interlocutors in the small-scale interactional event and in the larger sociocultural realm. Such a process, which operates a liaison between the interactional moment (discourse) and socio-historical repertoires (Discourse), is indexical. Indexicality thus has to do with the mobilization of meanings which are performatized in the contextualization process (Hanks, 2000). This is what Silverstein (2006/2009, p. 756) has referred to as “the principle of contextualization of linguistic signs and others in use”.

As discourse analysts tracing associations to make sense of texts, we engage in scalar work in different ways. We connect to theorists that orient to decolonial thinking as a particular ideological view and instantiate a critical angle in the reconstruction of recent political events. The specific vocabulary these authors employ and the narrative they articulate enable the diagnosis of a provisional state of affairs, variously labeled with signs such as extreme right, radical right, far right, alternative right, ‘neo-Nazism’, and Social Fascism, among others.

It is within such a scalar lens that we approach our data, paying close attention to the semiotic scales and the ideological load that the extreme right in Brazil has made recourse to in the discursive process of giving shape to gender and sexuality. Put differently, we observe scalar constructions and put them in perspective according to our own scalar maps. In so doing, we characterize different timeSpaces or chronotopes⁴ (Bakhtin, 1981) we refer to as a modernist-colonial chronotope and a socially-fascist extreme right chronotope.

3. A modernist-colonial chronotope

Firstly, we consider the realm of a modernist-colonial timeSpace and its territorializing practices, which divide and group things and beings according to purist, legitimate and essentialized ideals: nations, languages, genders, desires and races, among many others As a form of life, coloniality has produced a canon of thought that encompasses boundaries, separation, and ranking systems. In connection with subjectivities, this ordering impetus establishes hierarchies, patterns and standard behaviors, following a binary logic which opposes ‘identity’ and difference. This kind of dichotomous reasoning functions as a template for classifying social actors, positioning them, and performing segregational effects.

Modernity and coloniality, in their voracity to conquer peoples and their territories, have established ‘warranted’ and ‘deviant’ races, genders and sexualities. in their well-defined route to occidentalize the world. Simultaneously, such occidentalization constructed Europe as such (Venn, 2000) as well as all the delegitimizing Discourses about otherness which allowed, for instance, for the supremacy of whiteness (Mbembe, 2014), of hegemonic masculinity (Connel & Messerschmidt, 2013), and of heteronormativity (Butler, 1990). Such a chronotrope is still persistently evoked nowadays in the forms of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2016/1017), tanatopolitics (Agambem, 1995/2002), and queer necropolitics (Puar, 2007), defining which bodies are to live and which are to let die (Butler, 2009).

Transbodies are perhaps one of the greatest challenges to the modernist-colonial chronotope in our times because such bodies question clear-cut divisions between biologically-identified female and male bodies. This is only one example of lives which promptly require the reinvention of democracy. The extreme right however thrives on fomenting hate towards such bodies through transgender hate (Trujillo & Pérez, 2020) and through white supremacist Discourses (Mirzoeff, 2018; Sedgewick, 2019). What we address here as the necessary reinvention of democracy has been dubbed a Cultural War or Cultural Subversion by the radical right. Such a war has taken the phrases ‘gender ideology’ and ‘education without politics’, whatever they mean, as their guiding mantra and found grand appeal amidst Christians (see, for example, the extreme right defense raised in this direction by Marquez & Laje, 2014).

The modernist and colonial legacy coexists with the intense mobility of our contemporary timeSpaces. The advancements in transportation and information technology have made the transit of people, objects and Discourses much faster and easier. Therefore, border-crossing has gained impulse. Such porous frontiers associated with the egalitarian rhetoric of individual freedom have made room for alternative lifestyles, diversity and ‘identity’ politics. However, these transformational and more progressive Discourses intermingle with the persistence of modernity and colonial chronotopes in our times.

Mignolo (2020) has referred to this persistence as a new form of occidentalization or re-occidentalization. The re-occidentalization is now catapulted to the mere pressure of a computer key. This dynamic is the cornerstone of our societies that inhabit ourselves biopolitically (Foucault, 2004/2008; Karmy, 2016) to the rhythm of our algorithmically-led lives. Our lives are taken as onlineOffline to the point of making the former separation between human life and machines impossible. In many parts of the globe, we spend our days attached to computer screens, having mobiles become extensions of our own bodies.

Such considerations have invoked an extreme right chronotope which we take to be a conservative response to the chronotopic tension we have been describing. In many circles, particularly in Christian ones, it has brought about the fear of apocalypse. In other more general circles, it has provoked the threat of losing many of the certainties taken for granted so far and the supposedly firmness of the grounds on which many people have stood until now. Such tension has been fundamental in dislodging structuring references of whiteness, heterosexuality, and patriarchy.

Chronotopic friction has always existed. In the History of sexuality, for example, Foucault (1988/2001) discussed how the regimentation of sexuality simultaneously worked as repression and excitement. The more power and control focused on sexuality the more they incited it, the more resistance they generated. According to him, the history of this dynamic in relation to sexuality is the history of modernity - or the history of a modernist-colonial chronotope.

Contemporary onlifeOffline practices are continually bringing about chronotopic disruption to our front doors. Every other second, so to speak, we may engage with different chronotopes. In such a context, not only language turns up in unexpected places (Pennycook (2022) but also different races and the performance of varied sexual desires and genders openly cross the boundaries of social expectations (Moita-Lopes & Fabricio, 2018). This fact seems to be entangled with the relevance anti-racist and LGBTI+ social movements have had since the 60’s/70’s in many parts of the world as well as with a digitally-maneuvered social life and with the relative ease of quick transportation. This intense chronotopic attrition has constructed particular meanings that have challenged calcified Discourses about who we ‘are’, an essentialist perspective, and have opened up the door for a multiplicity of meanings about who we can be (Foucault, 1985/2010).

4. A socially-fascist extreme right chronotope

On the other hand, such attrition in the hands of the extreme right has mobilized what Mbembe (2016/2017, p. 81) has referred to as the obsessive “ontological necessity”⁵ of finding an enemy. Within the extreme right chronotopes, such a need has strongly nourished sexual anxiety. It has risen in the light of the unsettling Discourses about the existence of myriad sexual performances beyond the heteronormative matrix (Butler, 1990) and of the agenda for gender / LGBTI+ political rights.

In such socially-fascist ‘democracies’, the search for an enemy has flourished, qualifying legitimate forms of lives in a politics of ‘them’ versus ‘us’ (Stanley, 2018). As Stanley (2018) has argued, such politics is the cornerstone of a fascist biopolitics, which governs our bodies and lives. In these circumstances we can see biopower at work, as a “set of mechanisms by which that, which, in the human species, constitutes its fundamental biological characteristics, will become part of politics, through a political strategy, through a general strategy of power” (Foucault, 2004/2008, p. 21).

The problems generated in schools by Christian parents and fake-news about the existence of a ‘gay-kit’ distributed in Brazilian schools are telling examples of such biopolitics in the Bolsonaro years and beyond (Schultz, 2020). Parents fear how education is going to affect their children’s sexuality. Likewise, the intense patrolling of schools by radical right politicians in search for the enactment of the so-called ‘gender-ideology’ curriculum⁶ as well as the debates in local governments and the federal parliament in Brazil in connection with the same issue⁷ indicate the exercise of biopower. A clear concern with what bodies can sexually do is a major facet of social fascism in the Brazilian extreme right. In this connection, but within the racial sphere, is the photo of a member of the Bolsonaro’s government standing behind the president of the Senate, signaling the white supremacist symbol, with one of his hands⁸. A more general take on social fascism is the pathetic speech delivered by Bolsonaro’s Secretary of Culture, aired on the social media to the sound of Richard Wagner, which clearly emulated Goebbles, the Nazi ministry of propaganda. The secretary actually quoted notorious sections of a speech by Goebbles on art⁹.

All of these facts accentuate how a socially-fascist biopolitics was at work during the Bolsonaro’s years and it is still put into practice by his followers. In this context, it is noteworthy how sectors of Christian religious groups have found very fertile grounds for sedimenting their principles. A quantitative-qualitative analysis of 922 speeches by Bolsonaro in Parliament (Morais & Moita-Lopes, 2024) illustrates such situation by highlighting how, from 2011 onwards, Bolsonaro started to associate homosexuality to paedophilia, in the light of religious moralism.

What is at issue, we believe, is the persistence of the “colonial power matrix” (Quijano 2000), relating heteronormativity to whiteness in the construction of patriarchal discursive regimes, in attrition with contemporary chronotopes. It is such chronotopic friction that has brought about socially-fascist chronotopes, in Brazil as well as elsewhere¹⁰. This interconnection between sexuality and race also draws attention to how sexuality cannot be set apart from race as has been argued for in the queer theory literature (Moita-Lopes, 2022). Recent research into what sexuality was like before the colonization or the westernization of the world has emphasized the imposition of heterosexual and gender colonial practices on people. Colonization deeply impacted bodies and their desires, controlling sexual and gender practices in different corners of the world as in the Americas, China, and Africa (Oyewuni, 1997/2021; Fernandes 2019; Freestone 2020; Saunders 2020; James 2021). Despite the feminist and LGBTI+ social movements that flourished in the 20th century or because of the very dislodging meanings underlying these movements, many of the ideas that can be identified within the umbrella term of social fascism insist on the colonial mantra of ‘normal’ vs ‘abnormal’ sexuality to produce sexual anxiety and moral panic.

These socio-historical circumstances and the conflicting references they encompass have nourished the extreme right forces, particularly on the Internet, which have infectiously affected everyday life in many parts of the globe. Anti-diversity hate Discourses, anti-ecological Discourses and anti-scientific Discourses, particularly on the Internet, have been impinged on bodies in Brazil, Argentina, USA, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, the Philippines, France, Germany, Italy, England, Greece, Portugal, and Austria, among many others. Such Discourses have constructed what Moita-Lopes and Pinto (2020) have referred to as Sociopolitical Horror. In that connection, Nagle (2017) analyses myriad examples of how the extreme right on the Internet operates on creating panic through spreading fake news, trolls and pranks about racial, sexuality and gender issues. Sociopolitical Horror together with contemporary neoliberal economics - Economic Horror - has given rise to what Moita-Lopes and Pinto (2020) refer to as Perfect Horror. Such an oxymoron very well frames our radical times. As such, it puts forward a fundamental question to the stability of democracy or to its need of reinvention.

Although attacks on gender and LGBTI+ rights are indexical of the extreme right Discourses everywhere¹¹, Bolsonaro, as an extreme right leader, may perhaps be unique in how he openly brought issues of sexuality into his discourse. In order to pursue these goals, we focus on three interwoven chronotopes as times and territories (timesSpaces) which seem to have framed the narratives the former president and his ‘crew’ have animated to fodder the extreme right.

In what follows, we analyze the textual mobility of modernist-colonial texts into the making of contemporary texts. Such phenomenon produces chronotopic tension as conflicting timeSpaces co-exist. We make recourse to posts, tweets, and digital media in our corpus which contribute to the comprehension of the indexicalization of a repertoire of meanings about sexuality. Such indexicalization processes operate on forging scale projections of sexual anxiety around Bolsonaro and by himself. First, we focus on the projection of scales about the president’s ‘identity’ and then on his own semiotic labor on fabricating sexual anxiety.

5. Scaling the president’s ‘identity’

In October 2019, the President and some of his assistants attended a religious event called "March for Jesus, for the Family and for Brazil", during which Bolsonaro spoke to participants. His points were that “in the constitution it is written that a family is a union between a man and a woman”, that he is going “to respect the innocence of children in classrooms” and that ‘gender ideology’ "is a thing of the devil"¹². Indexically, Bolsonaro makes recourse to a conservative Christian repertoire of meanings, which highlights what a family is - “a union between a man and a woman”, that children’s “innocence” has to be protected and that “gender ideology” does not come from God. These signs index Discourses against contemporary types of family arrangements (solo mothers, gay or lesbian parents, for example), against paedophilia, and against the ‘irreligious’ concept of ‘gender ideology’, whatever that is. In a single speech, he ranks a list of conservative discourses which projects scales on himself as a man who wants to protect the traditional family, children and religion. The obsession with discourses forges a world that has basically become paedophiliac. As such, he is bringing to bear what we have referred to above as chronotopic friction between traditional conservative modernist-colonial discourses and contemporary discourses on how families are organized and on how sexuality and genders are performed beyond the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990).

What follows is the tweet posted by one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who reentextualizes his father’s speech at the March, but this time the President was visiting the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady Aparecida. The tweet is particularly relevant because it brings about the scale projections of Bolsonaro as pictured by a member of his own family while it reentextualizes a speech given by Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s Christian journey into different kinds of religions is never to be lost sight of when analyzing the semiotic exercise he is involved with.

Figure 2:
Eduardo Bolsonaro’s tweet on his father¹³

An anti-abortion president, who is against gender ideology, who is thankful to God for his life, who is a family advocate and does not give in to gayzism nor the politically correct. This person could but be greeted with ovation by a crowd of Catholics in the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida.

By re-entextualizing his father’s Discourses, Eduardo’s post projects scales on his father’s ‘identity’. As such, he categorizes his father as a Christian man who is anti-abortion, anti-‘gender ideology’, grateful to God and who defends the family. Bolsonaro and his son are therefore evoking fundamentalist Christian religious ideologies, both Evangelical and Catholic Christians, which constitute their projected audience. Following Christian principles, Bolsonaro performs the ‘identity’ of somebody that is the bastion of gender and sexuality ‘normativity’. Moreover, the neologism "gayzism" makes two simultaneous scalar claims. Besides projecting an evaluative scale indexing condemnation and contempt for homosexuality and the entire LGBTI+ community, it opposes the politically correct formulation. Note that “gayzism” was coined by following the morphological pattern of ‘homosexualism’, in which the suffix ‘-ism’ is indexical of Discourses on diseases.

The overall semiotic construction of the tweet projects timeSpace contours that invoke colonial-patriarchal ideologies, scaling social and presidential relationships according to the traditional patriarchal family. The president, as the father of the nation, is the protector of the family. Finally, as his son concludes, it is no surprise therefore that, as a ‘pious’ man, Bolsonaro is saluted with an ovation by the crowd in the Basilica on the day of Brazil’s patron saint (October 12). The post is indexical of colonial religious discourses. The fabrication of sexual anxiety discourses is in the horizon. Such apprehension is also intensified by the unusual juxtaposition of scales regarding religion and sexuality, discursive domains which are not commonly put together, except perhaps when indexing disapproval Discourses.

6. The President’s scaling of sexual anxiety

Here we analyze the re-entextualization of fragments of different public speeches recontextualized in social media. We observe how the president scales sexual anxiety, indexing a series of Discourses related to toxic masculinity.

1 “Is everything tiney-winey down there?”(Jun 2019)¹⁴

2 “I am not a limp dick and will never be. I have a ten-year old daughter, no adds-on necessary” (Feb 2021)¹⁵

3 "Today a businessman started talking about the qualities of a president: honest, hardworking... He said so many things, he failed to say heterosexual. I said: ‘heterosexual'. It has become a quality now". (Mar 2020)¹⁶

4 “We want one political center, no hate there, no hate here. Hate is a faggot thing. When I was at school, bullying meant beating people up”. (Nov 2020)¹⁷

In the first two extracts, the president makes recourse to signs (linguistic and others) which are indexical of Discourses about the phallus. In the first one, he is replying to a warm and enthusiastic address by a foreigner with Asian features, who recognized the President at the Manaus International Airport. The President singled out-with linguistic and gestural signs-the supposedly small size of the foreigner’s penis. “Is everything tiney-winey down there?, he asked. Upon doing so, Jair Bolsonaro implies a comparison between Brazilian and Asian men as far as genitals and sexual performances are concerned. Besides the reification of cultural stereotypes and the perspectivization of his own penis as big, the president seems to affirm his own sexual expertise in connection with penis sizes. This is a semiotic scale projected by someone that is performing hegemonic masculinity. The tourist, who seems to join the “humorous” frame, apparently has not got the vaguest idea about his being the target of mockery.

In the second public performance, Bolsonaro once again indexes a Discourse about his own penis, which is recontextualized in a daily news site (Catraca Livre). He is speaking at the inauguration of an athletic center in the state of Paraná. However, this time the scalar construction seems to back up the idea that he is an excellent contributor to the reproductive family: “I am not a limp dick and will never be. I have a ten-year old daughter, no adds-on necessary”. By positioning himself as a vigorous stallion, he projects himself as doing the ‘right’ gender and sexuality. The reproductive family is also a central Discourse of Christian beliefs related to the primordial function of sexuality. In this connection, the queer theorist Edelman (2004) draws attention to how sexuality in a queer world ‘impedes’ reproductivity, being this the reason why futurity is negated to queer lives. Bolsonaro seems to be building on this sort of agenda.

In the third performance, the president is speaking live on Facebook. He re-entextualizes the speech of a businessman who listed the qualities of a president: "Today a businessman started talking about the qualities of a president: honest, hardworking... He said so many things, he failed to say heterosexual. I said: ‘heterosexual'. It has become a quality now." The scalar projection implicitly mobilizes meanings about his own heterosexuality and, likewise, evaluates so-called ‘deviant’ sexual practices negatively. The implicature is that these practices have become so common and a menace to ‘normalcy’ that a president´s heterosexuality needs to be added to his portfolio. He is in fact being critical of the scalar projections as regards what a president should be like on the part of the businessman.

In the fourth extract, Bolsonaro further enacts a toxic male performance when giving a speech in the official inauguration of a governmental program. This speech is recontextualized in a daily online (Poder 360), which actually frames this sentence by indicating that Bolsonaro wants Brazil to stop being a country of ‘faggots’: 'We want a political center, no hate there, no hate here. Hate is a faggot thing. When I was at school, bullying meant beating people up”. By semiotically scaling the type of country he has in mind (“a macho country”), he is also perhaps preempting contemporary accusations of bullying in a so-called ‘woke culture’. In his school days there were no discussions over bullying but fights. In many other occasions, he also refers to physical attacks instead of arguing for negotiations. Together, these scalar claims echo a social fascist organization towards difference.

The last re-entextualization we focus on is what became known as the Golden Shower video. Bolsonaro posted it on his Twitter (now X) account during the Carnival celebrations of 2019, two months after he took over¹⁸. Looking back in time, the prematurity of this post may be understood as putting into perspective what is to come in connection with the semiotic forging of sexual anxiety, during his four years in power. "Golden shower" is the practice of feeling sexual pleasure by urinating on one’s partner or receiving jets of urine during sex or in a sexual context. The unusualness or, perhaps, awkwardness of a president posting such a video cannot be over-stressed. Some critics actually pointed out that he did not respect the liturgy of office. However, we claim he was in fact inaugurating a new way of performing the presidency by drawing attention to exceptional sexual acts or to sexual comments that fed sexual uneasiness. Likewise, the re-entextualization of Discourses on his penis or on his sexual power, highlighted in the previous analyses, is hardly present in a president’s rhetoric.

Obviously, the performative effects of this video reverberate until now since it was viewed by more than 4 million people in less than 24 hours and had international repercussions on the media (Le Monde, The New York Post, The Guardian etc.). It has actually become an entry in Wikipedia¹⁹. In fact, many people heard about this practice for the first time by watching this video, being this another reason for the scandalous apprehension the video mobilized. In particular, it showed a golden shower performance enacted between two men, who were celebrating Carnival. One of his secretaries gave the excuse that the President actually wanted to call attention to degenerate practices. And degeneration in this particular case, unsurprisingly, adds another layer of meaning to the traditional Discourse about same-gender sex practices as decadent and inadequate.

Such a position is actually paradoxical (or, perhaps, not!) with the continual appeal to sexual issues in Bolsonaro’s public performances onlineOffline. On the one hand, he positions himself as the Christian president who wants to protect the family and the child, as previously discussed, from how harmful Carnival has become, but, on the other, he is a president who instigates sexual fear. According to the Foucauldian approach to the productivity of power (Foucault 1988/2001), both types of scale projections can be understood as speaking to each other, as mutually-inciting tactics.

The link to the video on the tweet is framed by a comment, a text that functions as justification for the re-entextualization of the video and as a way of protecting himself from moral judgement.

Figure 3:
“Golden shower”, Bolsonaro’s post on Twitter

I don’t feel comfortable showing this but we have to expose the truth to the population so that it can be aware and always choose its priorities. This is what many Brazilian Carnival celebrations have become. Make comments and draw your conclusions.

Bolsonaro used the footage to criticize street celebrations, suggesting that revelers habitually strip down and urinate on another person's head. This is constructed as a truthful description of reality. Such a scalar fantasy is what motivated the cartoon by Matheus Ribs, which we took as the starting point of the text trajectory in focus. In a recent interview by email carried out by one of us, the artist explained his motivation to create the cartoon:

I made this cartoon at a time when the then president reduced the biggest festival in Brazilian culture (Carnival) to a video of a sexual act involving urine. On Twitter, Bolsonaro showed his contempt for Carnival and Brazilian culture. The cartoon arises from a need to record, criticize and mock the president's obsession with themes of sexuality, as well as his foul language, drawing attention to the downgrading of politics that year.

The text trajectory we have analyzed so far not only ratifies the cartoonist’s perception in 2019 but also characterizes a specific modus operandi in which the biopolitical management of sexuality and desires is still an ongoing concern. Not surprisingly, on the following day, Bolsonaro re-entextualized the discourses indexed in his previous post by twitting a question: “What is Golden Shower?”

Figure 4:
Bolsonaro’s post on Twitter “What is golden shower?”

Despite the national and international uproar or perhaps because of this very outrage the video post brought about the day before, Bolsonaro once again projects semiotic scales which instigate both sexual imagination and sexual apprehension.

7. Clashing scalar semiotic projects: subjectivities as the linchpins of micro/macropolitics

Indexing and scaling sexual anxiety seems to be a fundamental issue in operationalizing the Bolsonaro’s socially-fascist extreme right government. This is made possible in a world in which traditional colonial chronotopes clash with more contemporary libertarian chronotopes. In such different chronotopes, diverse semiotic scales are projected about how our bodies perform gender and sexuality. This clash mobilizes sexual apprehension because it emphasizes fear and moral panic, particularly if one considers that Bolsonaro exerts strong influence on the Christian communities. Such communities have been traditionally inculcated with beliefs about the fear of crossing the very well delineated line between the good and the evil. Besides this, sexual desire is packed with taboos which can be easily aroused if fear and anxiety are brought to bear. The socially-fascist principle that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ finds rich soil when it is motivated by moral horror and alarm.

At this juncture, it should be noted as Rolnik (2019) does, that sustaining each kind of society is a specific repertoire of Discourses about how subjectivities should be like to make it functional. Rolnik (2019, p. n/p) has also pointed out that “one cannot transform the distribution of rights of [a] system, which is the objective of macropolitics, unless one transforms the type of subjectivity that corresponds to it”. Her argument is that if changes are not working at both levels (micro and macropolitical levels), they end up returning to the same departure point. Subjectivity is what makes a system coherent and consistent by operating as such micropolitically. Subjectivity is thus political in her view “because it is the existential basis of an epistemological, historical and cultural system” (p. n/p). In this regard, particular scalarly-forged ‘ontologies’ that provoke sexual and moral panic converse well with a socially-fascist extreme right macropolitics.

Although this type of macropolitics to a lesser or greater extent is popular in many parts of the world, as an impressive number of Bolsonarists, Trumpists, Orbánists, Modists, Melonists, Mileists and others indicate, Bolsonaro maybe unique in relation to the amount of semiotic labor he puts into forging scales about his penis, his sexual prowess and non-normalized sexual acts.

There is political activist epistemological semiotic work to be done in all fronts that seriously affect subjectivities. It is with this concern that in this paper we have argued for the relevance of considering entangled chronotopes to understand our socially-fascist extreme right timeSpaces as semiotized by scales and indexicalities. We understand that this kind of semiotic analysis may contribute to paving the way for hope in what is to come.

Acknowledgements

Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes is grateful to CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) for a grant that has made his research possible (304408/2022-0) and Branca Falabella Fabrício is also thankful for two grants (CNPq - 309794/2022-6 and Faperj (Rio de Janeiro State Research Foundation - E-26/201.103/2021) which have supported her research.

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• 1
  Originally, the cartoon was published on the artist’s social media accounts (Instagram and Facebook). We came across it at <https://www.completemagazine.com.br/post/matheus-ribs-o-artista-carioca-que-aprendeu-a-transformar-a-escrita-em-imagem>
• 2
  We are thankful to Matheus Ribs for granting us permission to use his artwork in this essay.
• 3
  Following Gee (1990), in this article we draw on a distinction between Discourse (with a capital D) when we refer to bodies of knowledge, ideas, views and socio-historical repertoires, and discourse (with a small d) when we refer to language in use in both written and oral interaction.
• 4
  Chronotope is a construct devised by Bakhtin (1981) to account for how time and space are displayed in the organization of the novel. Blommaert & De Fina (2015) have also made recourse to this construct to argue for chronotopic ‘identities’.
• 5
  All translations of texts not referenced in English are ours.
• 6
  https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/blog/edimilson-avila/noticia/2019/10/11/deputados-tentam-fazer-vistoria-no-colegio-pedro-ii-e-provocam-confusao-com-reitoria.ghtml
• 7
  https://www.camara.leg.br/noticias/699563-projeto-criminaliza-promocao-de-ideologia-de-genero-nas-escolas/
• 8
  https://veja.abril.com.br/coluna/radar/assessor-de-bolsonaro-vira-reu-por-gesto-racista-em-sessao-do-senado
• 9
  https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-01-17/secretario-da-cultura-de-bolsonaro-imita-discurso-de-nazista-goebbels-e-revolta-presidentes-da-camara-e-do-stf.html
• 10
  In some media circles, there is talk about a global threat deriving form a general shift toward the extreme right in international politics. This trend is constitutive of new right political movements in the form of extreme right governments, political parties, and groups around the world that have gained visibility (Teitelbaum, 2020; Sedgwick, 2019; Nagle, 2017). Even in countries where the left has a long history of social engagement such as in France or in supposedly well-established democracies such as the USA, the extreme right has gained momentum in the last decade, creating social and political concerns everywhere. In spite of the different perspectives underlying these phenomena in several parts of the world, they share the common perception of ongoing menace to a white Eurocentric colonial heritage.
• 11
  For example in Brazil, England and Poland, see Fabrício & Moita-Lopes (2020, 2019), Sauntson (2020) and Pakula & Chojnicka (2020).
• 12
  Vídeo on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSXjgsicVIQ
• 13
  https://www.poder360.com.br/congresso/eduardo-bolsonaro-sobre-presidente-nao-se-curva-ao-gayzismo/
• 14
  https://extra.globo.com/noticias/brasil/bolsonaro-faz-piada-com-oriental-tudo- pequenininho-ai-veja-video-rv1-1-23668287.html
• 15
  https://catracalivre.com.br/cidadania/bolsonaro-diz-que-e-imbrochavel-aos-65-anos-e-faz- piadinhas-sexuais/
• 16
  https://www.poder360.com.br/governo/bolsonaro-diz-que-ser-hetero-passou-a- ser-qualidade-de-1-presidente/
• 17
  https://www.poder360.com.br/governo/brasil-tem-que-deixar-de-ser-pais-de-maricas-diz-bolsonaro/
• 18
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ1hxr7cRJk
• 19
  https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controv%C3%A9rsia_do_golden_shower

• Data available
  The data used in this study are available in the article.

Edited by

• EDITORA GERAL:
  Marcia Veirano Pinto http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0795-6297

Data availability

The data used in this study are available in the article.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Dec 2025
• Date of issue
  Oct-Dec 2025

History

• Received
  31 Oct 2024
• Accepted
  21 June 2025