During the 2018 Family March with Bolsonaro, hundreds of Jair Bolsonaro supporters trailed behind a sound truck moving slowly through the main avenues of Recife, Brazil. Mounted on the sound truck was a poster of Bolsonaro dressed elegantly in a suit and tie. This image, as if doing the work of an absent body, rose above the multitude who followed it. Many carried yellow and green balloons reproducing the colours of the Brazilian flag while passionately chanting MC Reaça’s ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ (Bolsonaro’s Prohibited Funk).Footnote 1 The singer’s voice blasted through the speakers, twisting the opening lines of MC João’s funk hit ‘Baile de Favela’ (Favela Funk Party). The marchers’ chanting boomed through the upscale centres of Recife in stark juxtaposition to MC João’s celebration of bailes funk in the periferias and favelas of São Paulo.Footnote 2 The original track employs feminine pronouns to address the singer’s object of desire, but MC Reaça’s adaptation substitutes these with masculine ones, introducing Bolsonaro as a rising, transgressive figure:
This replacement of lyrics without substantial alteration to the musical structure exemplifies what music scholars conventionally refer to as a contrafact. However, I approach this compositional practice as a metaphor for the ‘alternative facts’ or ‘counterfacts’ that have characterized the rhetoric of the New Right.Footnote 5 The phrase ‘alternative fact’ garnered public attention in 2017, following Kellyanne Conway’s use of it to justify then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false assertion regarding the size of Donald Trump’s inaugural audience. In Brazil, the notion entered the Portuguese lexicon through news media coverage of the controversy, although it has not permeated ordinary conversations. Therefore, I use ‘alternative fact’ or ‘counterfact’ to describe strategies that have attempted to portray New Right leaders as truth-tellers despite the prevalence of misinformation in their political tactics. By ‘counterfact’, I do not mean a conditional statement describing a hypothetical situation, whether or not such a statement is contrary to fact, as the ‘alternative facts’ examined here lay spurious claim to facticity.Footnote 6 Instead, I use the term to describe statements by far-right political figures that are contrary to fact. Similar to a contrafact, an alternative fact relies on an existing statement or fact to introduce a pseudofact that directly contradicts the original. The apparent choice offered by the alternative is thus misleading, as the alternative facts examined here seek to counter and replace the initial claim, as well as its concomitant sense of reality.
As a contrafact of MC João’s ‘Baile de Favela’, ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ reworks material familiar to both fans and detractors of the funk scene. News media and popular discourses tend to mark funk as distasteful, cartel-aligned, and, above all, obscene.Footnote 7 At the forefront of this crusade to criminalize Brazilian funk are several political leaders of the New Right. In 2019, for example, Charlles Evangelista, a federal deputy from the Partido Social Liberal (PSL), introduced a bill aiming to prohibit sexually transgressive songs. In his words,
This bill is based on the fact that there is great disrespect for public morals, as in the case of those who play songs containing derogatory or offensive expressions in public environments. The problem arises from the explicit content of the lyrics, which deal with sexual themes and sometimes advocate crimes. In this way, the criminalisation of certain musical styles would be a way of guaranteeing the mental health of families, especially children and adolescents who do not yet have the necessary discernment to differentiate the real from the imaginary. . . . These songs . . . attack the image of women, appeal to erotic behaviour, and contain numerous swear words.Footnote 8
The invocation of ‘women’ as quintessential victims of funk culture is intimately connected with the racialized stigmatization of its practitioners. Although Evangelista’s bill avoided naming any specific musical genre, another proposed bill named funk more explicitly, calling the culture ‘a crime against public health’.Footnote 9
This representation of funk in conservative politics is at odds with Bolsonaro’s use of ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ during his presidential campaign. The campaign’s adoption of this contrafact shocked many political observers not only because of the song’s play with the obscene but also because the New Right has been among the staunchest critics of Brazilian funk. In Brazil, ‘funk’ is not directly associated with the African American genre of the same name, although, as with that funk, Brazilian funk is part of a broader Afro-Atlantic culture. Funk has become emblematic of the subversive practices of youths living in Brazil’s urban periferias and favelas. What happens, then, when funk is placed in the service of its fiercest detractors? If the campaign appealed to the conservative morality of Brazil’s many evangelical movements, how might we read this unexpected adoption of funk?
Is this a classic populist manoeuvre aimed at appealing to the working classes by incorporating a ‘palatable’ version of funk into campaign rallies? The co-optation of samba during Getúlio Vargas’s regime, known as Estado Novo (1937–1945), is well documented.Footnote 10 Vargas employed populist politics to forge a loyal base in the working class while repressing radical political action. His regime introduced new forms of urban cultural citizenship that appealed to the popular classes through affirmative performances of their cultural practices, albeit within a strictly delineated framework intended to curb advances in civil rights. The mass appeal of samba, already facilitated by the expansion of recording industries, played a significant role in the state’s nation-building agenda. Samba’s inclusion in the national canon was nevertheless symbolic, as it trapped demands for racial justice with empty gestures of cultural recognition. This narrative, however, does not describe what happened at the Family March with Bolsonaro; as a parody of ‘Baile de Favela’, MC Reaça’s song deliberately reinscribed the social exclusion of funk culture.
Brazilian evangelical singers have also reworked popular genres, such as rock and música sertaneja, just as currents within the US Christian right have appropriated hip hop.Footnote 11 In these contexts, however, the transgressive elements associated with these genres are typically recast to align with Christian values. Bolsonaro’s political use of the contrafact differed by leveraging the genre’s transgressive aesthetics as a populist, performative strategy. Changes in US electoral politics indicate a similar aesthetic turn, as scholars grapple with the ‘contradictory factors drawing growing numbers of people of color into conservative formations and politics’.Footnote 12 In 2018, Kanye West publicly endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump, and at a 2024 campaign rally in the South Bronx, Trump invited rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow on stage.Footnote 13 Set against hip hop’s predominant associations with progressive and anti-establishment politics, these developments raise important questions about how and why such convergences occur. The 2018 Brazilian case under study follows a comparable but distinct trajectory. As with MC Reaça, who adopted this stage name parodically and expressed antagonism towards funk culture, the campaign’s use of the contrafact did not seek to incorporate funkeires into its political agenda. Nevertheless, this employment of funk may have created openings for subsequent appeals to the funk world. In 2018, far-right candidates would have likely found the prospect of connecting with funkeires unthinkable, but by 2024, two contenders in the São Paulo mayoral election had enlisted funk producers in their campaigns. These collaborations generated controversy on social media, with many funk fans criticizing the producers and recalling the candidates’ previous attacks on funk culture.Footnote 14 A fuller account of these recent developments, however, lies beyond the scope of this study.
In this article, I examine the sociopolitical implications of the New Right’s stagings of transgression during and briefly after Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign. To this end, I analyse contrafacta, news reports, and social media posts to represent the views of far-right politicians such as Bolsonaro and other key supporters of his campaign. I also rely on conversations I had between 2021 and 2023 with interlocutors living in the working-class periferias of São Paulo, many of whom reported voting for Bolsonaro in the 2018 election.Footnote 15 My analysis foregrounds the role of musical practices in informing political processes: First, it demonstrates that contrafacta such as ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ articulate transgression as an aesthetic strategy for the New Right; and, second, it reveals how these performances lend credibility to so-called alternative facts. The notion of contrafact, moreover, clarifies how ‘alternative facts’ can both ‘double reality’, to borrow Gavin Steingo’s formulation, and disrupt the reality they oppose.Footnote 16 The following pages trace the role of these practices in forging an alternative political reality with tangible effects on social life. In doing so, this article contributes to lines of inquiry established by studies of music and politics.
A growing body of scholarship has studied funk culture and the discourses surrounding it. At the core of this literature is a concern with the criminalization of the genre and its practitioners.Footnote 17 Brazilian news media have frequently portrayed bailes funk as sites of illegality and sexual impudence, praising police operations aimed at disassembling these social gatherings. Such narratives normalize the militarization of urban periferias and favelas, as the military police have become the predominant form of state presence in these areas, putting at risk the lives of funk practitioners and local dwellers. Hermano Vianna’s O mundo funk carioca (1988), the earliest study on the topic, assembled a moral history of funk culture’s formation.Footnote 18 Subsequent studies have focused on the role of funk in protest and narratives of citizenship, whereas others have attended to the creative dimensions of this culture in response to its vilification in news media.Footnote 19 Paul Sneed’s research documents the suppression of funk proibidão through narratives of exclusion and illegality, presenting this music as a site at which favela residents and criminal factions negotiate their expectations.Footnote 20 This body of work can be read alongside broader scholarship on music and politics in Brazil, much of which has focused on protest songs, sound, and rhythms in leftist activism.Footnote 21 Andrew Snyder’s study of Rio de Janeiro’s carnival brass bands offers an account of how musical repertoires are repurposed for leftist protest, and Kjetil Klette Bøhler’s research on both left- and right-wing political formations reveals how musical protest practices and campaign jingles operate as a vital affective force for political mobilization.Footnote 22 Taken together, these studies provide valuable perspectives on the role of music in contemporary Brazilian politics.
For my part, I am interested in what happens when transgressive practices of musical rewriting, often associated with progressive movements and the critique of bourgeois institutions, are mobilized in support of an ascendant far-right movement.Footnote 23 In this sense, I respond to calls to examine the musical dimensions of contemporary right-wing politics as these movements have gained prominence in public discourse.Footnote 24 I begin by discussing MC Reaça’s contrafact of ‘Baile de Favela’, demonstrating how it recasts widely publicized events in an ‘alternative’ light. In the next section, I consider the ‘post-truth’ context in which this contrafact emerged, situating the song within a constellation of other contrafacta circulating on social media platforms and the streets of São Paulo’s periferias. In the final section, I reflect on the New Right’s performances of transgression and their controversial claims to alternative facticity. In parsing the gendered dynamics of these performances, I draw parallels between the ongoing crisis of masculinity and the reactionary economy of post-truth politics. Through shock and trolling humour, far-right figures perform an aesthetic sensibility that signals their alternativity to the liberal ‘mainstream’. This representation enables the New Right to distance itself both from neoliberal promises of tolerance and from the traditional right-wing political and aesthetic canon. In a context marked by economic crisis, political corruption, and post-truth politics, this performance of transgression, I argue, falsely portrays New Right leaders as truth-tellers.
Cannibalizing funk, contrafacting transgression
In Brazil, the term funk initially referred to bailes funk or dance parties in Rio de Janeiro’s nightclubs that played music imported from the USA, especially 1970s soul and funk and 1980s funk and rap.Footnote 25 In this context, funk designated a social event in nightclubs rather than a musical genre. Some local funk performers embraced ideas from US Black liberation movements and expressed Black pride, whereas others, whether deliberately or not, allowed these ties to get lost in translation.Footnote 26 Local adaptations drawing on freestyle and hip hop soon started to emerge. One example is DJ Marlboro’s first LP, Funk Brasil (1989). In the 1990s, the music spread to the favelas, and funk became associated with low-budget songs containing simple melodic lines and looping electronic bass beats derived from Miami bass. The batida funk maintained the syncopated rhythmic pattern, rendered through beatboxing or electronic beats. Depending on the style of funk (funk ostentação, funk consciente, or brega funk, to mention a few), lyrics might portray life in the favelas, include explicit erotic content, show off material possessions such as expensive cars, or criticize police brutality. More often than not, funk culture expresses a desire to overcome precarity and vulnerability as listeners are transported into a world of sexual pleasure, power, and plenitude.Footnote 27
In funk proibidão (prohibited funk), these musical features are often employed to develop a musical style that has been perceived as highly sexual, with polemical references to drugs and criminal factions such as the Comando Vermelho (Red Command). Such references have led to its censorship on television and radio, making bailes funk and other informal economies the primary sites of circulation. In an interview, MC Mascoste recalled the 2008 contrafact ‘Rap das armas’ (Rap of Guns) by MCs Cidinho and Doca as one of the earliest songs in the style of funk proibidão. Footnote 28 The song’s first version, written by MCs Junior and Leonardo in the 1990s, borrowed melodic material for its refrain from the 1986 song ‘Your Love’ by the English rock band The Outfield. Local police investigated both duos following allegations of the funkeiros’ connections with criminal factions.Footnote 29 The controversy centred on the songs’ references to machine guns. In both versions, however, the singers invoked the arsenal imagery to bemoan the disposability of favela residents who found themselves increasingly caught up in civil wars between the military police and drug cartels, a dichotomy that sometimes overlooks the involvement of local police in narco-trafficking. ‘Rap das armas’ became a hit after appearing as diegetic music in the 2007 crime film Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad). Listeners continued to label the track as proibidão, even though its inclusion in a mainstream movie undermined the aura of hyper-prohibition.
The New Right’s use of ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ was expedient insofar as it staged the type of transgressive extremism that some of its leaders sought. On the surface, the mobilization of the song seemed to clash with the conservative axis at play in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections. Undergirding Bolsonaro’s campaign was a conservative wave mainly associated with evangelical movements. As Ronaldo Almeida illustrates, Bolsonaro’s moral agenda relied heavily on signalling neo-Pentecostal codes, while downplaying his membership in the Catholic Church.Footnote 30 Almeida provides a detailed yet unambiguous account of Bolsonaro’s political agenda. But the question of how we understand the disjunction between the New Right’s conservative morality and its deployment of an obscene style is relevant within this context. Some evangelicals expressed disapproval of Bolsonaro’s transgressive displays, including his adoption of MC Reaça’s song, and others regarded his plans to dismantle gun control regulations as too radical.Footnote 31 These transgressions nevertheless seemed to consolidate the support of most evangelicals.
Political transgression, historically associated with the Left, and especially with the New Left, has been adopted by the US online alt-right since the early 2010s. Writing about alt-right groups on platforms such as 4chan, Angela Nagle notes that this shift marks the ‘full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right’.Footnote 32 The Brazilian New Right and its online subcultures share this anti-moralism with the online alt-right described by Nagle but differ in their embrace of Christian morality. Bolsonaro’s political agenda, similar to Donald Trump’s, reconciles these ostensibly opposing tendencies by mobilizing a conservative, theocratic programme (as seen in the slogan ‘God above all’) while grounding its legitimacy in a public anti-moralist stance.
This performative tension is evident in the figure of MC Reaça, who professed a Christian identity on social media but flaunted an anti-moralist style. Talis Volpi released ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ on YouTube in 2018 under his stage name, MC Reaça. The name is a deliberate play on reaça, a Portuguese slang for ‘reactionary’, commonly used to describe individuals who espouse ultra-conservative views and oppose social change. By adopting this stage name, Volpi signaled both his willingness to shock and his unapologetic alignment with Brazil’s far-right movement. The coupling of MC, a prefix widely employed by Brazilian funk artists, with Reaça adds another layer of irony by borrowing the genre’s conventions to articulate ideas that are profoundly inimical to funk’s cultural ethos. Soon after Volpi released the music video, YouTube removed it with the notification, ‘Este vídeo foi removido por violar a política do YouTube sobre discurso de ódio’ (This video was removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech). Paradoxically, the attempted censorship augmented the song’s cultural capital: The music video resurfaced on adjacent YouTube channels; remixes of the contrafact by other users proliferated across Spotify, YouTube, and other social media platforms; and the contrafact became the soundtrack of several pro-Bolsonaro rallies.
Consider the following verse from ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’:
Amplifying Bolsonaro’s position, the lyrics articulate anti-moral tendencies that are markedly gendered and racialized. While a hypermasculine rhetoric performs anti-moralism, the white(ned) bodies and proper behaviour of right-wing women become repositories for the movement’s remaining sympathies with Christian morality. The video juxtaposes images of protesting feminists with those of right-wing girls’ boa aparência e bom comportamento (good appearance and good behaviour). This representation also appears in ‘Olha a Opressão’ (Here Comes Miss Oppression), another contrafact by MC Reaça that caricatures feminists as extreme and out of control.Footnote 34
These songs’ rhetoric closely aligns with that of Bolsonaro, who has publicly glorified the military dictatorship, told congresswoman Maria do Rosário that he would not sexually assault her because she was ‘too ugly’, and stated to the press that he would prefer to see his son dead rather than gay. If there was ever a time when conservative political figures confined such statements to private exchanges or concealed them with great effort, today, they erupt onto national and international stages. MC Reaça’s song alludes to some of these events, but in the song, they appear in a different light:
‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ contrafacts widely reported events such as Bolsonaro’s verbal attack on Maria do Rosário. Through trolling irony, the song lambastes charges of misogyny against Bolsonaro as mere mimimi from an overly sensitive, woke establishment.Footnote 44 The lyrics also construct the enemy as the left, broadly understood as encompassing feminist movements, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and the spectre of Paulo Freire. Although MC Reaça conjures the reviled image of communism, which, for Bolsonaro and many of his followers, stands for the entire left, he ridicules Lula da Silva’s pretension to the ‘commie’ title; after all, Lula allegedly goes to New York City, an icon of ultra-capitalist consumption, as he pleases. The logic underpinning this alternative fact rests on the portrayal of the Workers’ Party (PT) as radically communist, even though, as Michel Löwy has noted, the Workers’ Party ‘has obviously nothing to do with communism (in all possible definitions of the term)’.Footnote 45 As I discuss in a subsequent section, such anti-communist sentiments enabled far-right political figures to position themselves as truth-tellers.
Although MC Reaça labelled the song a parody, the lyrics do not parody funk but rather satirize leftist movements. Framing it as a parody of ‘Baile de favela’, however, establishes an oppositional distance from funk culture. For example, a widely circulated Facebook post by Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who was elected to the Senate in 2018, introduced the song ‘for those who say that a good funk doesn’t exist’.Footnote 46 Through sarcastic, self-reflexive humour, the post signalled the rejection of funk by an unwilling audience that deems it ‘obscene’ and ‘annoying’.Footnote 47 For this audience, ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ becomes the exception to the rule of good taste that ostensibly defines funk as terrible music. Others, who dismiss funk as barulho (noise), go even further, rejecting ‘music’ and ‘culture’ as categories through which funk can be understood. In response to these sentiments, recent political demands have called for the recognition of funk as a legitimate cultural practice. This position, which also constitutes a strategic response to repeated attempts to criminalize funk, has gained traction in the political agendas of several movements, particularly among a new generation of Afro-Brazilian feminists.Footnote 48
If an older generation of conservative figures abided by the rules of polite society through impeccable public decorum, Bolsonaro’s campaign use of ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ marked a break from the traditional right-wing aesthetic canon. It signalled a new aesthetic sensibility for the New Right not only by parodying funk – thereby separating funk practitioners from the ‘deserving’ citizens – but also by cannibalizing the hypermasculine figure of the malandro, the street-smart hustler of funk culture.Footnote 49 This move can be seen in Bolsonaro’s signature hand gesture mimicking a machine gun. At the end of MC Reaça’s video, Bolsonaro reacts to the music, bursting into laughter and saluting the songwriter with the hand gesture to signal approval. An emblem of his electoral campaign, the gesture circulated ubiquitously alongside his calls to dismantle gun control regulations and his nostalgic invocations of Brazil’s dictatorial past.Footnote 50 In another context, the same gesture is a hallmark of funk culture, signifying a transgressive malandragem that oversteps the moral boundaries of polite society and often positions itself against the military state of which Bolsonaro is an icon. The following section examines the political context in which this song emerged, placing it within a broader field of ‘post-truth’ politics.
Corruption and post-truth in the Brazilian political landscape
In the past few years, far-right parties have surged to governmental power across several countries, making the rise of the New Right a global phenomenon. The global financial crisis of capitalism in 2008 and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential elections were major catalysts for the rise of the far-right worldwide. In 2018, xenophobic and nationalist parties led many countries of the European Union, including Italy, Finland, Austria, Poland, Hungary, and Belgium. In Brazil, far-right parties, intellectuals, and militias had been organizing for years before Bolsonaro’s ascension to governmental power. Nevertheless, this takeover still took many scholars and political analysts by surprise, partly because of the nearly two-decade record of left and centre-left administrations before the 2018 presidential election. The New Right’s deployment of organizing strategies traditionally associated with leftist social movements was also unexpected; Brazil had not seen such an organized movement since the military dictatorship of 1964–1985.
The Family March with Bolsonaro, mentioned in the introduction, represented both a demonstration of support for Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign and a revival of the 1964 Marcha da Família com Deus pela Liberdade (Family March with God for Liberty). This march was the first in a series of public demonstrations held between 10 March and 8 June 1964 against President João Goulart’s reformas de base, a program of major structural reforms in agriculture, education, and other sectors.Footnote 51 Leading the demonstrations against Goulart were right-wing politicians, members of an entrepreneurial elite, the conservative wing of the Catholic Church, and women’s organizations such as Campanha da Mulher pela Democracia.Footnote 52 According to an article published on Jornal do Brasil on 20 March 1964, the day after the first demonstration in São Paulo, the march gathered ‘over 500 thousand’ participants.Footnote 53 Protesters called for a ‘military intervention’ to eliminate the alleged threat of ‘atheist communism’, a prelude to the dictatorial regime that would govern Brazil for the next twenty-one years. Fifty years later, right-wing demonstrators revived the Marcha during a noisy demonstration in downtown São Paulo in front of the Catedral Metropolitana de São Paulo (The Metropolitan Cathedral of São Paulo), where the first march occurred. They carried signs proclaiming, ‘The armed forces are our last chance’ and ‘Say no to communism. Our flag is green and yellow. There is no place for the sickle and hammer’, the latter of which is a Portuguese rhyming variation of previous signs exhibited in the old marches, such as ‘Verde e amarelo sem foice nem martelo’ (Green and yellow, no sickle, no hammer).
At the time, several scholars and political commentators underestimated the remnants of what seemed to be a distant and closed dictatorial past. I am not suggesting that history repeated itself but rather emphasizing the continuities, discontinuities, and transformations between the last dictatorship and the emergence of a New Right that, for decades, eluded the eyes and ears of many political observers. Some have suggested that, despite this militant activism, it is of little use to distinguish the New Right from the country’s traditional right as both are equally invested in neoliberalism and conservatism. Notwithstanding these continuities, it is possible to trace the formation of a New Right in the country as a local and global phenomenon.Footnote 54 Moreover, distinguishing between the traditional right and the New Right in the Brazilian context is crucial because it reveals the political ramifications of their aesthetic divergences, as seen in the campaign’s adoption of ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’.
Various social axes enabled the rise of the New Right to governmental power, including the political mobilization of evangelicals, the economic crises triggered by the state-owned oil company Petrobras, and the gendered polarization of the 2014 elections.Footnote 55 In ‘A emergência da vida para superar o anestesiamento social frente à retirada de direitos’ (Overcoming Social Numbing after the Withdrawal of Rights), Marielle Franco reflects on the political conjuncture following the parliamentary impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, backed by the Congress and the Supreme Federal Court (STF). Franco’s analysis illustrates how this authoritarian turn directly affected the everyday lives of Black women and women of colour in the favelas. In response, these women assumed ‘central roles in the fight for state policies that challenge inequality and the human dimensions of civil rights’.Footnote 56 For her political activism and commitment to speaking truth to power, Marielle Franco – a Black, queer activist and Socialism and Freedom Party councilmember – was assassinated in 2018 by a far-right militia group.
Franco briefly suggests that discourses on corruption posed a significant challenge to working-class women’s political organizing. This gesture, however, draws attention to the kind of ideological work that discourses on corruption were performing at the time. Ideas about corruption have long informed popular understandings of politics, but as a trope, they gained prominence during Operation Car Wash (2014–2021). This investigation by the Federal Police unveiled a network of illegal fundraising involving multiple political parties, including members of the then-governing Workers’ Party. Allegations that Luis Inácio Lula da Silva accepted bribes to facilitate contracts between Petrobras and private construction companies eventually led to his imprisonment, barring him from running in the 2018 presidential election. In the wake of these developments, a sense of disenchantment with politics overtook many Brazilians, as Franco observes:
[A] considerable number of favelada women view political participation with some distrust. They are unlikely to be in touch with those who can access state institutions—seen by the majority as belonging to the undifferentiated ranks of the political elite. This segment has been growing, as the dominant classes succeed in spreading the idea that the most serious problem facing Brazil is not inequality, but corruption. The more this perspective takes hold of the collective imagination, the more people will reject political participation and identify ‘the politicians’ as the main cause of corruption.Footnote 57
Corruption became associated not only with politics but even more so with the Workers’ Party. One mundane rumour, for example, presented the following narrative: ‘I heard Lula cut his finger to stop working and sue his employing company. I don’t know if this is true, but it is very likely’.Footnote 58 Such rumours circulate as something that ‘everybody’ seems to know except for the order of public appearance, or, at least, everybody anticipates, given the country’s historical record of political corruption. A radical rupture occurs when an instance of corruption is publicly exposed in news media, confirming for those entangled in the web of rumours that their suspicions were justified. In this sense, rumours operate outside factual truth and the validation of news media and other institutional spaces, while remaining extraordinarily effective as speech acts, even if inaccurate.Footnote 59 Without claiming facticity, rumours became a way to question the credibility of some public officials.
Sexism and misogyny were also behind the broader delegitimization of former President Dilma Rousseff, who would later be impeached based on corruption allegations. Misogynistic montages of Rousseff in magazines such as Veja and Isto é were entrenched aspects in the everyday lives of many subscribers or uninterested subjects passing by newsstands. The sounds of Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit ‘Gasolina’ were audible once again through the speakers of cars passing on the streets of São Paulo’s urban periferias, but this time, the lyrics were altered and the sounds slightly twisted, morphing into the contrafact ‘Ela aumenta a gasolina’ (She Raises the Gasoline Price).Footnote 60 On YouTube, parodies of Rousseff’s administration proliferated during her term. The song ‘A Presidenta’ (The President), a contrafact of Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’, with sexualized representations of Rousseff (see Figure 1), amassed over 13 million views.Footnote 61 Through satire, the singer looped discourses on corruption, revealing the covert machinations of Rousseff’s supposed communist regime:
Mederijohn Corumbá impersonates Dilma Rousseff, with her typical red attire: ‘Welcome to communism. . . . I’m the President with the most sex appeal’. ‘A Presidenta’, YouTube, 2014. Screenshots by the author.
Figure 1 Long description
Two screenshots from the 2014 YouTube video ‘A Presidenta’ showing comedian Mederijohn Corumbá impersonating former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. In the left image, the performer wears a red blazer, heavy makeup, and a short auburn wig styled to resemble Rousseff’s hairstyle. Leaning toward the camera with outstretched hands and an ominous facial expression, the performer stands before two private security men in dark suits positioned in the background. The translated lyrics at the bottom read, ‘Welcome to communism’. In the right image, the performer appears at an outdoor construction site, wearing a short red dress, exaggerated padded buttocks, high heels, and a pearl necklace, posing suggestively near a vertical pole. The lyrics read, ‘I am the president with the most sex appeal’.
Similar to ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’, ‘A Presidenta’ portrays the Workers’ Party as radical by turning Rousseff into the personification of communism (see Figure 1). The joke falls on the oxymoronic figure of a communist president secretly obsessed with indulging in the guilty pleasures of surplus capitalism (see Figure 2). Still, this juxtaposition does not undermine the alternative fact that the Workers’ Party stands for a communist regime. On the contrary, it revamps the old tale of a corrupt authoritarian vanguard preaching equality and exalting hard work while greedily revelling in the very capitalist power structures it claims to dismantle.
The video depicts a communist president likely en route to the United States to purchase Apple devices, the most coveted commodities: ‘Want to travel abroad/Buy contraband to look mod?’ Screenshots by the author.
Figure 2 Long description
Two screenshots from the YouTube video ‘A Presidenta’ show Corumbá parodying Rousseff, with a red suit, black trousers, heavy makeup, and a short wig. The image on the left depicts Corumbá sporting a salacious expression and strolling through an airport terminal with a red carry-on suitcase. The translated lyrics at the bottom read, “Want to travel abroad.” In the right image, the performer appears outdoors against a blurred background, holding Apple devices while wearing the same red attire. Translated lyrics at the bottom read, “Buy contraband to look mod.”
Olavo de Carvalho, a conspiracy theorist who provided much of the intellectual foundation for the renewal of the Brazilian far-right, advances this argument in one of his books. Carvalho cultivated a substantial following on YouTube, where he disseminated the alternative facts developed in his publications. In ‘PT, o Partido dos ricos’ (Workers’ Party, the Party of the Rich), he offers an origin story of political corruption within the Workers’ Party:
The Worker’s Party is a thieving party because it is a revolutionary party affiliated with a tradition of Machiavellian amorality that goes back at least to the French Revolution. [W]ith increasing intensity since the First International in 1864 and even more so since the foundation of Lenin’s Social Democratic Party, [the Worker’s Party] has always believed it has the right, and even the obligation, to finance itself through robberies, kidnappings, extortion, and the embezzlement of public funds, as well as through a multitude of legal and illegal capitalist businesses, the total volume of which would make even its most reactionary bourgeois enemies envious.
Making his point by assertion, Carvalho exhorts those who remain sceptical to ‘study the life of Lenin, and you will see what I am saying’. ‘Lenin’, he claims, ‘was a kind of J.P. Morgan’.Footnote 62 A statement that begins as a simile quickly turns into a pseudofact, as readers are told in passing, and without sources that ground it as a statement of fact, one significant detail: ‘J.P. Morgan’s contributions increased that [party’s] capital, along with money from the robberies led by Stalin’.Footnote 63
Appealing to outrage and employing a ‘transgressive’ rhetoric that claims to cut straight to the point, Carvalho performs the maverick outsider who rejects the norms of an allegedly hegemonic, communist establishment. Many of his ideas found expression in MC Reaça’s songs. ‘Olha a Opressão’, for example, narrates the fictional story of a young woman who is ‘cured’ from her feminism and leftism after MC Reaça hands her Carvalho’s O mínimo que você precisa saber para não ser um idiota (The Least You Need to Know Not to Be an Idiot), a book that promises to expose the truth about contemporary politics. The wide circulation of these parodic songs on social media, along with Carvalho’s own following, shows how far-right groups bypass mainstream media by relying on online subcultures to disseminate their ideas.
In his study of the far-right as a global phenomenon, Enzo Traverso suggests that today’s ‘[c]ommunism and the left are no longer [the right’s] foremost, mortal enemies’.Footnote 64 The animosity towards postcolonial immigrants has replaced the hatred against yesterday’s Bolsheviks. Anti-communist rhetoric, he notes, ‘has disappeared . . . among the radical right voters. . . . Postfascism starts out from anti-feminism, anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia; the radical right continues to bring these impulses together’.Footnote 65 The New Right in Brazil shares many of these compulsions but differs in its aggressive anti-communism and nostalgia for the military dictatorship. But I see this anti-communist sentiment and its alternative facticity as a rhetorical strategy: anti-communist statements by far-right figures like Olavo de Carvalho created spaces for the New Right to emerge as truth-tellers despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the conspiratorial character of their statements.
Similar to Carvalho, Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a colonel who tortured and killed several protesters during the military dictatorship, played a significant role in the revival of the far-right. In 2006, he published A Verdade Sufocada: A História que a Esquerda não quer que o Brasil conheça (The Strangled Truth: The History the Left Prevents Brazil from Learning). The book purported to tell the ‘truth’ about the military dictatorship, aiming to counter the alleged dominant interpretations advanced by a communist regime in the country. Ustra sought to convince the reader that the numerous tortures and killings he committed during the military regime were justifiable and even heroic in the face of the communist threat. Notwithstanding some historians’ critique of this implausible revisionism, Folha de São Paulo reported that the book was the sixth best-selling non-fiction title in 2016.Footnote 66
These anti-communist counterfacts, along with the sexism and aggressive media coverage of Operation Car Wash centred on the Workers’ Party, eroded Rousseff’s public image and catalysed her congressional trial in 2016. The strategy was successful as Rousseff was impeached, even though no evidence directly linking her to these corruption scandals was ever produced.Footnote 67 This is an important example of how alternative facts have been used to create an alternative political reality that has a performative effect on real life. These discourses on corruption, fraud, and lying generate public anxiety, setting the ground for a structure of feeling that animates a regime of ‘post-truth’.Footnote 68 As a periodizing notion, the prefix ‘post’ does not mark the demise of truth but rather a shift from ‘regimes of truth’ to ‘regimes of post-truth’.Footnote 69 That is, if knowledge-producing institutions such as universities and the press, as well as expert institutions within governments, benefited from certain credibility as truth-tellers in the twentieth century, today’s proliferation of contesting truths undermines their authority, generating sentiments of political distrust, as seen in the denial of COVID-19 or human-driven climate change. As Jayson Harsin suggests, post-truth dwells on confusion, discord, and polarized views, both well-informed and misinformed. This phenomenon becomes a fertile terrain for the production of new economic and symbolic capital. Outlets of misinformation and disinformation often attract large and receptive audiences; this attraction, in turn, opens the space for new markets of truth to emerge, such as fact-checking in journalism.Footnote 70
Several commentators characterized the public response to Rousseff’s impeachment and Bolsonaro’s subsequent election as irrational.Footnote 71 However, the tendency to view some working-class voters, especially cisgender women, as irrationally voting against their own interests regarding Bolsonaro’s election is misplaced. Given the country’s history of extreme inequity, violence, and multiple records of corruption, some could deem it ‘irrational’ not to be sceptical of truth claims coming from the government. Corruption is a recurrent theme in daily conversations, social media posts, and news media reports, as well as a central concern in public administration.Footnote 72 These concerns fuel and are simultaneously galvanized by the embeddedness of mass media in consumer capitalism.Footnote 73 In other words, the profound mediatization of a short-attention economy responds to consumer demands and, at the same time, produces them through endless cycles of sensationalized corruption.
The news media’s focus on corruption conceals structural inequity and servitude, thus postponing measures to address the enduring legacy of a colonial structure that still governs everyday life in the country. In these narratives of corruption, the moral laxity of political figures is portrayed as the root cause of political corruption, rather than the material conditions that sustain it. Structural inequities are strategically displaced in favour of a narrative that creates a simple, causal relationship between corruption and inequity. This idea resurfaced on several occasions during my conversations with Bolsonaro supporters, including one who remarked, ‘Brazil is a country that does not move forward because of political corruption’.Footnote 74 Such narratives reinforce political inertia and nihilism by suggesting that non-involvement in political decisions is preferable, as many identify ‘the politicians’ as the root of corruption. It was from within this affective structure that Bolsonaro successfully mobilized his campaign. Because ideas about corruption saturated popular understandings of politics, Bolsonaro’s electoral victory rested on his ability to frame his campaign as a social movement propelled from outside the political establishment, despite the fact that he served as a councillor and federal deputy in Rio de Janeiro for nearly three decades without tangibly working against political corruption.Footnote 75
For many years, mainstream news media have benefited from the commodification of truth through spectacles of political corruption. New markets of truth continue to emerge to capitalize on post-truth politics, as seen in the case of media conglomerate O Globo’s creation of a truth market focused on debunking rumours (see Figure 3).Footnote 76 It is important to ask what is at stake in these discourses on corruption when the solutions proposed by New Right leaders such as Bolsonaro and allied entrepreneurial elites involve the privatization of national institutions and the militarization of favelas.Footnote 77 What is the relationship between this avowed combat against political corruption and proposals to militarize the favelas? Why is a supposed increase in public security, often used as a euphemism for the militarization of the favelas, framed as another solution to political corruption? For some, the answer lies in an alternative fact that has convinced them of the covert alliance between ‘communist’ parties, such as the Workers’ Party, and narco-trafficking in the country.Footnote 78
Fact-checking article stating, ‘It’s #FAKE that an ex-delegate revealed in a book that Lula claimed to have cut his finger off so that he wouldn’t have to work’, 2019. Fato ou Fake, G1. Screenshot by the author.
Figure 3 Long description
Screenshot of a fact-checking article published on the Brazilian news website G1 in its ‘Fact or Fake’ section. The page shows G1’s red-and-white branding, with a large headline stating, ‘It’s #FAKE that an ex-delegate revealed in a book that Lula claimed to have cut his finger off so that he wouldn’t have to work’. The subheading reads, ‘Tuma Jr.’s book about the former president does not contain the statement circulating on social media. According to the former police chief, Lula never made such a remark to him’. Below the subheading is an image showing the word ‘FAKE’ in white capital letters over a photograph of a book cover and a man. The article is dated 18 June 2019.
The obscene president
In a book analysing the rise of the New Right in Brazil, Perry Anderson predicts an unfulfilled promise: ‘Time may teach [Jair] Bolsonaro elements of what public comportment as president requires’.Footnote 79 In disbelief, liberal media obsessively catalogue the shameless displays of obscenity adopted by far-right political figures like Bolsonaro. In 2019, O Globo, the largest Brazilian newspaper, circulated an article titled ‘Bolsonaro Posts Obscene Video about Carnaval and Causes Outrage and Polemic on Social Media’, delivering all the details of the controversy.Footnote 80 By 2021, the coupling of Bolsonaro and the obscene had become a recurring affair.Footnote 81 Left out of this criticism was the question of what kind of work Bolsonaro’s obscene spectacle was doing. After all, who was interested in discussing the blatant implementation of neoliberal austerity policies or the proliferation of debt among the popular classes when the hottest news in Brazilian media reported Bolsonaro explicitly boasting about his ‘never limp’ penis?Footnote 82
In this final section, I unpack these politics by examining two facets of the work obscenity performs. First, I suggest that this representation enables Bolsonaro to distinguish his government from those of notorious conservative and liberal predecessors whose mandates were tarnished by corruption scandals. Second, obscenity strategically casts Bolsonaro as a populist figure. As a performative move, populism pretends to abolish representation by claiming to speak directly for and with the people. The obscene also shares this strategy by relying on a truth-telling trope that pretends to do away with representation by showing it all.Footnote 83
Linda Williams coined the term on/scenity to describe the paradoxical dissemination of obscene materials across news media. The term names the ‘gesture by which a culture brings on to its public arena the very organs, acts, bodies, and pleasures that have heretofore been designated ob/scene and kept literally off-scene’.Footnote 84 Williams uses on/scenity to frame right-wing politicians and anti-pornography feminists’ crusade to censor ‘obscene’ materials in the USA. A case in point was the controversy around then-senator Jesse Helms’s 1989 condemnation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s art. Helms exhorted other senators to ‘look at the pictures’ as he waved Mapplethorpe’s ‘dirty’ photographs above his head so that they could see ‘exactly what they were voting on’.Footnote 85 Similarly, in 2019, Bolsonaro tweeted what several journalists tagged as a pornographic video. His idea was to instigate the censorship of LGBTQ + public events for the alleged depravity of this community’s public behaviours during carnival festivities: ‘I am not comfortable showing this, but we have to expose the truth for the people to know and act on their priorities’.Footnote 86 On/scenity, then, explains this paradoxical ‘spectacle of bringing on the obscenity in order to keep it off’.Footnote 87
There is another dimension to this spectacle, a double negation that on/scenity alone cannot fully explain. After Bolsonaro posted the video, seeking to incite the censorship of LGBTQ + public events, several users reported him, prompting X to restrict access to the video with a warning of sensitive content. The censor was censored. A wave of disapproval quickly followed, as reported in the news: ‘For experts, a video post published by Bolsonaro represents a break with the rules of decorum and the solemnity of the Presidency. Experts in communication and ethics condemned the posture adopted by the President; obscene images were seen by two million users’.Footnote 88 Although polite speech and decorum may be considered the sine qua non of the presidential figure as a public persona, Bolsonaro disregards these conventions. Because he breaks these unwritten rules of public comportment, critics often characterize him as ‘transgressive’. This portrayal relies on an understanding of transgression that may obscure as much as it reveals the cultural work of these performances. One formulation, offered by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, describes transgression as ‘a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms, designating what is high and low’.Footnote 89 But the assumption of the obscene as a form of political transgression that disrupts the norms of polite society demands close scrutiny, particularly as the New Right deploys it to achieve just the opposite in its struggle to solidify social hierarchies.
This strategic use of transgression can be read as a performative citation of populism’s anti-establishment politics. In Latin America, the term ‘populism’ has often been used to describe regimes from the 1930s to the 1960s led by popular and charismatic figures on the left.Footnote 90 The term lost its specificities once political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff adopted it to describe the Le Pen movement in France in the late 1990s.Footnote 91 Since then, populism has been framed as a style of doing politics that could be paired with various and even opposing ideologies.Footnote 92 Several scholars and journalists have similarly employed the term to describe Bolsonaro’s mass appeal;Footnote 93 however, casting populism in this light risks turning it into a euphemism for racism, xenophobia, and fascism. Moreover, many neoliberal philosophers have used the concept to obscure significant differences between the radical left and the far-right by placing them within the same category, thus naturalizing neoliberalism as a zero-degree ideological system.Footnote 94 As such, I use this notion insofar as it underscores that Bolsonaro’s so-called populism remains in the realm of performance. One major difference between Bolsonaro’s popular movement and classical Latin American populism is that earlier regimes sought to include marginalized groups, even if only symbolically. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, parades his intention to exclude the most impoverished segments of the population and other minoritized groups in favour of the so-called majority.Footnote 95
Bolsonaro’s popular appeal to the ‘majority’, articulated through an exclusionary logic of ‘in’ and ‘out’ group identity, lies at the heart of a fundamentalist nationalism that has characterized the New Right as a global phenomenon, exemplified by tropes such as ‘America First’ or ‘Brasil acima de tudo, Deus acima de tudo’ (Brazil above all else; God above all else). MC Reaça’s ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ expresses this nationalistic fervour, but beneath its patriotic veneer rests an ultra-neoliberal agenda aligned with US economic interests.Footnote 96 Neoliberal ideologies, ranging from individualism and meritocracy to support for the free market, mobilize a peculiar nationalism in the name of modern progress. MC Reaça voices a desire for national advancement – ‘Brazil moving forward, the people expect’ – while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the US flag. This audiotopia of modern progress positions the USA as Brazil’s future, sustaining a narrative that promises the Global South the attainment of a US standard of economic prosperity. This view conceals the neocolonial hold that the USA has had over South American countries such as Brazil, sustaining the assumption that if Brazil were in alignment with the USA from the beginning, the nation would be in a more prosperous economic condition. For many Bolsonaristas, then, the ultra-neoliberal vision of the New Right promised a radical alternative to the supposedly tolerant and corrupt neoliberalism of the Workers’ Party.
In claiming to speak for ‘the people’, MC Reaça’s contrafact signalled the formation of a right-wing popular subject. ‘The people’ came to represent ordinary citizens disillusioned by political corruption, ostensibly forming a homogenous subject across racial, class, and gender differences. Bolsonaro appealed to many in the popular classes by presenting himself as one of them and thus framing his campaign in opposition to the political establishment. He posed as a strong leader capable of re-establishing order by eradicating corruption. But many Brazilians had heard such promises before. Former president Fernando Collor, for instance, built his 1989 presidential campaign on a similar anti-corruption platform, only to be impeached two years later after a family dispute unveiled a trail of influence peddling and nepotism. Bolsonaro’s displays of misogyny, racism, and homophobia constructed an aura of truthfulness and honesty that contrasted with Collor’s politeness and elegance. If the unwritten laws of public comportment construct a figure of impartiality through polished, professional conduct, the New Right deliberately flouts these conventions. In this sense, it is a systematic confrontation of basic norms of public decorum – as opposed to ‘political correctness’ – that marks Bolsonaro as a public persona, as Figure 4 shows.
Bolsonaro wears a counterfeit (pirata) soccer Jersey during a government meeting in Brasília. Bolsonaro’s Instagram post, 14 February 2019, @jairmessiasbolsonaro. Screenshot by the author.
Figure 4 Long description
Photograph of a government meeting in Brasília showing Jair Bolsonaro seated at the centre of a conference table surrounded by officials in business attire. Bolsonaro wears a light-green counterfeit soccer jersey that contrasts sharply with the formal dress of the other participants. Several glasses of water, notebooks, cell phones, snacks, and pens are arranged on the wooden table. Three men seated beside Bolsonaro are engaged in discussion while another man in a dark suit stands behind him, holding an open notebook, apparently ready to take notes. Bolsonaro faces forward, with a serious expression, as the group convenes for a high-level government meeting.
In explaining the Bolsonaro phenomenon, an interlocutor told me, ‘He might be misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic, but at least he isn’t corrupt, stealing money like everybody else who came before him. He is a humble, honest Christian’.Footnote 97 Although many view Bolsonaro’s remarks as belligerent, this statement suggests that such behaviour did not undermine his legitimacy; on the contrary, it became central to his appeal.
As the above statement also indicates, the campaign’s success in securing votes in periferias owed much to its appeal to evangelicals, despite the adverse effects of the New Right’s political agenda on these communities. In conversations with people who reported voting for Bolsonaro, I observed various levels of electoral commitment, partly due to Brazil’s mandatory voting. One interlocutor expressed indifference towards the process, stating that he voted for Bolsonaro only because his wife had written the candidate’s information on a slip of paper for him to bring to the polls. In turn, she explained her support by invoking Bolsonaro’s Christian values. This appeal was evident even in Pentecostal churches that professed political neutrality. In a conversation with a young petista who had long attended the Congregação Cristã no Brasil (CCB), she offered a critical reflection on the influence of church leaders over her parents’ voting decisions:
One of the teachings I heard since I was a child in the CCB was that, as servants of God, we should not involve ourselves with politics, just as the church would not take a political position. In 2018, during the presidential election, I saw everything change when Bolsonaro ran for president. Many people in the CCB liked his ideas because they thought he brought Christian values into the state. I even saw some brothers make that ‘machine gun’ gesture. I found this behavior to be contrary to what the church taught us about love and Christian behavior. But not everyone was like this. There were people in the church who did not like Bolsonaro.Footnote 98
This account provides a rarely documented critique of bolsonarismo within evangelical communities, and it further demonstrates how symbols of transgression and anti-moralism circulated in these spaces.
Kjetil Klette Bøhler’s musical ethnography is particularly useful for illustrating how far-right actors were able to ‘humanize and popularize bolsonarismo’ in periferias by driving sound cars that looped campaign jingles designed to influence voters.Footnote 99 Sound cars are a common presence in working-class bairros such as Jardim Marília, unlike in upscale areas, where the lei do silêncio (noise law) is strictly enforced. In the months leading up to the presidential election, these vehicles were a constant presence on the streets, often becoming a nuisance to residents. In addition to the usual sound trucks announcing goods for sale at regular intervals, one could hear sound cars moving slowly while blasting ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’.
MC Reaça’s contrafact also illustrates how Bolsonaro’s ‘populism’ resonated with many by selling a return to an idealized masculinity against the advances of social movements for gender, racial, and sexual justice. Bolsonaro’s performance flaunted virility, Christian muscularity, and militarism, galvanizing the desires of those who found themselves unable to apply these values. It may be no coincidence that cisgender men from various social classes constituted the largest bloc of Bolsonaro’s electoral support.Footnote 100 Accompanying the investment in this specific masculinity, however, are the psychic costs for both non-white and putatively normative white men. In other words, recoiling into this masculinity proves injurious not only to the ‘Other’ but also to these men.Footnote 101 Prescriptive representations of ‘Man’ – an unmarked social norm operating within a system of power that gravitates toward the ‘white, thin, male, . . . heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure’Footnote 102 – interpellate those who fall short of this ideal through a fundamental lack, characterized by what one is not and what one does not possess. Bolsonaro’s masculinist theatrics appealed to many working-class cisgender men because they promised both material and symbolic redemption from downward mobility, as captured in his campaign slogan, ‘O caminho da prosperidade’ (The Path to Prosperity).Footnote 103 But, as David Eng has written, ‘to accept this racial and (hetero)sexual logic – to aspire to the presumed material rewards it offers – amounts to what Angela Y. Davis calls “accepting a bribe” – an illusory compensation for powerlessness’.Footnote 104
Michael Kimmel, Jason Stanley, and Matthew Lyons have observed that economic crises play a vital role in the formation of masculine subjectivities.Footnote 105 In times of economic recession, a cisgender man in crisis might turn into a violent reactionary who sees the civic and economic participation of cisgender women and gender-non-conforming people as a threat to the ‘natural’ order.Footnote 106 Rosana Pinheiro-Machado similarly notes, in her ethnographic account of Bolsonaro’s supporters, that, given the destabilization of the patriarchal role of many men who are now unable to function as ‘breadwinners’, this masculinity crisis appears to be inseparable from the ongoing neoliberal economic crisis and the political structures that enable it. After describing an Uber Driver’s misogynistic comments, Pinheiro-Machado writes, ‘Many of these men were not monsters or masculine militants. On the contrary, they were gentle; they were men who dreamed about having a job, honest workers’.Footnote 107 Although economic recessions have undoubtedly exacerbated this crisis of masculinity, the assumption that this phenomenon is a new development demands careful consideration.Footnote 108 For whom, one might ask, does this crisis represent a shift, when such violent outbursts have long punctuated the everyday realities of mulheres periféricas?Footnote 109
With this in mind, I contend that this explosion of obscene spectacles in the mass media signals rather the explicit rupture of racist, sexist, and homophobic discourses into the ‘public’ domain of ideas and behaviours that have been central to the Brazilian cultural psyche; otherwise, how could Bolsonaro’s transgressions be interpreted by many of his supporters as proof of his ‘sincerity’? As I suggested, such performances mark a departure from the aesthetic canon of the traditional right, as far-right political leaders refuse public respectability in favour of an ostensibly unmediated persona. By laying it bare and showing it all, far-right figures seek to legitimize themselves as truth-tellers, disavowing the misinformation and disinformation at the core of their political strategies. Tracing the contrafacta recreations and the repetitive loops of songs such as ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ and ‘A Presidenta’ offers an opportunity to address the role of alternative facts in the New Right movement. As archives of alternative facts, these songs reveal how music participates in the New Right’s struggle to disrupt the fabric of social reality.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Alejandro L. Madrid, Benjamin Piekut, Catherine Appert, Jane Juffer, and Steven Pond for their invaluable suggestions on the early drafts of this article. Many thanks go to the anonymous peer reviewers for their incisive feedback and to André Nascimento, Rachel Horner, Nathaniel Mitchel, and Rafael Torralvo da Silva for helping me refine my thinking. I am similarly grateful for the feedback I received during conferences and other public talks, especially for the insightful suggestions of Brigid Cohen and Clifton Boyd.
Cibele Moura is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Miami. She holds a Ph.D. in Music and Sound Studies from Cornell University and an M.A. in Musicology from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research explores the power struggles at the intersection of popular music-making, listening practices, and knowledge production in Latin America. Her current book project, titled Listening to the Obscene, examines ‘obscenity’ as a category of racialized sexuality in Latin American sonic cultures. Tracing censorial discourses from the New Spain Inquisition’s prohibition of songs in the mid-eighteenth century to contemporary efforts to criminalize Brazilian funk, the book demonstrates how notions of vulgarity have shaped the reception of music within and beyond Black and mestizx working-class communities. Moura is also the co-editor and co-translator of A luta pelo nacional popular na Bolívia (Editora da PUCRS, 2024), which introduces the heterodox Marxist work of René Zavaleta Mercado to Lusophone audiences.
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