Properly sexed, properly reproductive: Sexual and reproductive rights and the rhetoric of the new Brazilian conservatism

Abstract

Brazilian congressional membership has increasingly been marked by socially and economically conservative, often explicitly Christian, politicians. This study aims to provide a mapping and a critique of these congressmen’s discourses on issues pertaining to sexual and reproductive rights, by means of discursive analyses of Law proposals currently under consideration by Congress, as well as other secondary documents. This approach may prove to be useful in identifying the discursive articulation of ideas of nationhood, normative genders, sexualities, and kinship structures in Brazilian conservative rhetoric, providing a useful starting point for further contestation of attempts to halt social recognition of rights to people categorizable as sexually and socially “deviant”. This rhetoric holds a strong appeal for the precarious subjects of neoliberalism, because they provide a link between a deontological conception of divine triangulation as the basis of meaning, and bodily normativity/ethical purity in the face of disastrous “modernization”.