“Moral Turn” and the Entextualization of Homosexuals as Pedophiles in Bolsonaro’s Speeches in Congress (2000 to 2018)

Abstract

In this article, we aim to carry out a qualitative-quantitative investigation of 922 shorthand notes of Federal Deputy Jair Bolsonaro´s speeches in the Chamber of Deputies from 2000 to 2018. As objectives, we analyze (i) the presence of religious and military lexical items in the hatred rhetoric of Bolsonaro throughout this chronological segmentation and (ii) the “moral turn” in his political discourse, when, from 2011 on, he starts to associate homosexuality with pedophilia. To do so, we anchored ourselves in a lexical analysis methodology, bringing Corpus Linguistics closer to Linguistic Anthropology. To that end, we distributed the data into two sub-corpora, from 2000 to 2010 and from 2011 to 2018, having as a parameter, firstly, to describe the diachronic contrast in the occurrences of 20 keywords, divided into 10 for the religious discourse and 10 for the military, and, secondly, to explain the reentextualization of the sign “pedophilia” in the (re)organization of the relationship between hate speech, homophobia and moral panic in the speeches of the politician. The pronouncements were processed in the AntConc program and in Excel. From 2011 on, the Bolsonarist discourse begins to balance the use of lexicons from the ultraconservative military discourse and the Christian fundamentalist discourse.