Discursive disputes around march 8

transgender and religious fundamentalism in the brazilian national congress

Abstract

This article analyzes the speeches given by Federal Deputy Nikollas Ferreira and Deputy Érika Hilton on March 8, 2023, Women's Day. Considering that in 2022, for the first time, two trans women were elected to the National Congress, their election promoted political discourses that confronted cisheteronormative values and discussions on gender and sexuality issues, both through their actions and through the exclusionary discourses promoted by other representatives, which delegitimized them and distorted their experiences. In this sense, this work aims to analyze the antagonistic discursive positions assumed by conservatism and transgender people in the Chamber and on social media regarding the identity of “woman”. To achieve this, the method of discourse analysis was used from the perspective of Foucault's discursivity and biopower (2008), gender, sexualities and transgender people by Butler (2002, 2018 and 2021) and Nascimento's transfeminisms (2021). From these perspectives, the corpus analyzed consisted of speeches given by Nikollas Ferreira in the Chamber of Deputies on Women's Day 2022, and by Érika Hilton, specifically in a video posted on social media on the same date. From this, it can be concluded that bodies are, above all, discursively constructed, given that both representatives are subjectivized as women and, consequently, represent a gender disruption in the face of essentialist religious ideology. Thus, the celebrations of International Women's Day in the National Congress exemplify the different control mechanisms that lead to gender-based violence, focused, above all, on discourses that institutionally question “being a woman”.