Gendered politics of enmity

Abstract

This paper analyses the role language and gender have played in the construction of animosity among various constituencies during a political crisis in Brazil. To do so, it investigates a language ideological debate about the innovative use of the letter X as a gender morpheme – an inclusive alternative against Portuguese binary grammatical gender system. The data include op-eds, blog posts, news articles and in-depth semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the debate. The analyses track the emergence of competing metadiscursive and metapragmatic regimes about grammar, gender and politics. On a macro-sociological level, this language ideological work helps shape politics of enmity which characterise the current state of democracy in Brazil and elsewhere. However, it also points to the emergence of situated counterdiscourses of solidarity which help individuals face an otherwise debilitating social context.

Language in the middle: Class and sexuality on the Hinglish continuum

“…Without question, sociolinguistics would benefit from more research incorporating class analysis. In my own field of language, gender, and sexuality, this direction is made more pressing by the global rise of dangerous "anti-gender" far-right campaigns that exploit class inequality to advance misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic discourses (see, e.g., Barát, 2021 ;Borba, 2019a ;Borba et al, 2020 ;Gal, 2021 ;Kosse, 2019 ). Yet from my own vantage point within this field, class analysis has remained very much alive-a reflex, perhaps, of the historical concern across first-and second-wave feminisms with labor issues (see Ferguson et al, 2019 for a review), coupled with late 20th century feminist concerns in U.S. academia with gender inequality as mutually constituted by inequalities of class and/or race (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987 ;Crenshaw, 1991 ;Davis, 1983 ;Ehrenreich, 1983 ;hooks, 1984 ;Stanworth, 1984 ).…”

Swings and Scales of Democracy: The “Transgender Epidemic” and Resistance to Antigenderism

“…Hosting a lecture guided by nonscientific content in a Legislative Assembly seems to respond to a projection of de-democratizing scales that pervades Bolsonaro`s Brazil. Integral to this scalar project is the invention of enemies (Mbembe, 2017;Borba, 2019a). The moral crusade against gender equality and sexual diversity undergirds bolsonarism and its modes of action at various levels of the polity.…”

“…The democratic expansion produced by recent changes in cisheteropatriarchal orders has been met with increasing suspicion by conservative factions of society who see their own sexual anxieties reflected in the figure of the angry white straight cis man (Kimmel, 2017) most notably embodied by Bolsonaro. Not surprisingly, Brazil has become a hotspot for anti-gender campaigns that oppose the enfranchisement of LGBT+ citizens through a crusade against "gender ideology" (see, for instance, Borba, 2019a;Corrêa and Kalil, 2020). Anti-genderism finds fertile ground in transphobia (Case, 2019) and has been pivotal to de-democratization dynamics globally.…”

Relocating power

“…The successful foray of inclusive language policies into linguistically diverse institutions bears witness to this mainstreaming (Cameron 2012;Curzan 2014;Zimman 2017). Yet the strident response that these measures have provoked also reminds us that language reform from below is as political as it is potent (Borba 2019). Despite the feminist advances that have been made, patriarchy and the linguistic mediation of sexism remain relentless (see, for example, Caldas-Coulthard 2020; cf.…”