“In defense of the children and the family”: Reflections about the discourses of “conservative” religious actors in public controversies involving gender and sexuality

Abstract

The current article results from research carried out between 2010 and 2018 on the arguments raised in public controversies that have pervaded the Brazilian political scene in recent years, examining the discourse of “conservative” religious actors, especially parliamentarians adopting a religious rhetoric. The author scrutinizes the moral panic created around the School without Homophobia Project, dubbed by its detractors “Gay Kit”, from 2011 onwards; she then analyses the intense debates (beginning in 2013) revolving around education plans all over the country – debates in which the term “gender ideology” has been growingly used. Finally, the author examines the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, in which the “Gay Kit” was one of the main topics of the president-elect’s campaign. All such controversies, which arise in a scenario of strengthened “conservatism”, share two characteristics. First, the confrontation of different moralities related to gender and sexuality. Secondly, the discourse that depicts children and adolescents as having to be “protected”. The author then hypothesizes that childhood and adolescence have become strategic features to think over the transformation that the Brazilian sexual policy is currently going through.