THREADS OF A HASHTAG: ENTEXTUALIZATION OF RESISTANCE IN THE FACE OF POLITICAL AND SANITARY CHALLENGES IN BRAZIL

FIOS DE UMA HASHTAG: ENTEXTUALIZAÇÃO DE RESISTÊNCIA FACE A DESAFIOS POLÍTICOS E SANITÁRIOS NO BRASIL

ABSTRACT

The scenario for this paper is the combined sanitary and political crisis that Brazil has been facing in these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The country is ideologically polarized and this polarization has been enhanced in the last year and a half in Bolsonaro’s government. A bleak period characterized by a way of governing that Silva (2020) names “pragmatics of chaos” due to denialism (even of the very pandemic) and to the neoliberal values cherished by a radical right-wing that supports the President and backs the discontinuation of important public policies, mainly those directed towards minoritized groups and environmental protection. Having in mind such a scenario, and amidst the societal bewilderment and inaction regarding the President’s contradictory actions towards democracy, we chose to focus on a rare event of direct resistance featured by a migrant of Haitian origin, who told in the face of the president what maybe many Brazilians had not dared to say. What is of interest here is that this performance, recorded on a mobile phone, and posted as a tweet, went viral, and gave rise to a hashtag - #acaboubolsonaro [ItsOverBolsonaro] - that is still alive seven months later. With a focus on the man’s performance of resistance and its entextualization on social media, we analyze his discourse and the impacts of his positioning. In the analysis, we try to retrace some of the threads traversed by the hashtag in two Twitter accounts and some of the reverberations on Instagram. We also discuss how the discursive thread of the postings weaves a metareflexive fabric about the man’s performance. We see this meta-reflection as an acknowledgment of another praxis that we have called ‘pragmatics of resistance’.

Keywords:
resistance; entextualization; indexicalization; political and sanitary crisis; vulnerable Other