“Love will win over hate”: affective resistance to Bolsonaro's politics of hate in Brazil within the framework of the 4th feminist wave in Latin America

Abstract (English)

This paper aims to investigate the political-affective strategies widely employed in Brazil's recent political scene, both by social and feminist movements and by the Bolsonaro government and neoconservative coalition groups. We understand that the last decade, especially before and during the Bolsonaro administration, has been characterized as a politically troubled period, in which antagonistic tensions have opened up space for anti-democratic policies and discursive practices, especially those aimed at human, reproductive and sexual rights. Different feminist groups have risen up in response to Bolsonaro's anti-gender, homophobic and racist attacks, in a broad resistance movement in the streets and on social media. This large collective body, which encompassed the most diverse feminisms - from black, liberal and radical to evangelical, was mobilized by affects such as fear, hope, love and terror in an activist movement that transcended the barriers of time and space. Cecilia Macón (2022) highlights the use of temporal-affective machinations by the feminist movement in Latin America, pointing to the intergenerational connections and speed with which affections are currently intermittent on the internet. However, feminist “structures of feeling” act in tension with the dominant neoconservative culture, which similarly employs the same strategies, but in a way that politically mobilizes the hatred of its supporters. Thus, we propose the understanding of a temporal-affective-discursive field of dispute in Brazil, in which there is a temporal-affective mobilization of love by the broad feminist resistance front in the face of the politics of hate wielded by former president Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters during his term in office (2018-2022) and election campaign. We will frame this dispute theoretically within Macón's (2022) understanding of the 4th feminist wave in Latin America, seeking to understand how different groups use love and hate to achieve their goals, whether democratic or not, amid a scenario of crises and transformations in political activity.