‘Boys wear blue and girls wear pink’: Critical Discourse Analysis on ‘gender ideology’ in the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights

Abstract

This article investigates what was the main ideology guiding the public policies of the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights (MMFDH) in the Jair Bolsonaro administration (2019-2022). In his inauguration speech, Bolsonaro stated that one of his government’s objectives would be to combat ‘gender ideology’ and defend ‘true human rights’. Thus, this research starts from the perspective that there is a dispute in Brazil around the notion of human rights, and the use of the phrase ‘gender ideology’ is a key element to understand how this dispute occurs in the political scenario, especially with regard to creating moral panic regarding LGBTIQIA+ people. With the aim of understanding the guiding ideology of public policies developed by the MMFDH, a state sector where this dispute seemed to be a central element, Critical Discourse Analysis was used as an analytical methodology. To compose the research corpus, the speeches of the main representatives of the MMFDH, Damares Alves and Angela Gandra, were analyzed from January 2, 2019 to March 31, 2022. We concluded that, in the period analyzed, the MMFDH was a promoter of ‘gender ideology’.