The Dilma Rousseff Presidency: From Motherly Discourses to Queer Impeachment
By: José O. Pérez (he/him/his)
Recently, Brazil has made international headlines for overwhelmingly negative reasons. From being a Covid-19 hot spot with high mortality rates, to having an unhinged president with an authoritarian proclivity, to massive deforestation in the Amazon and political violence against indigenous leaders, to rising levels of poverty and hunger.
This recent research publication provides some background context and explanations for how Brazil arrived at this predicament, by examining a breaking point in post-democratization Brazil: the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Rousseff was the country’s first female head-of-state, democratically elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, before being impeached on dubious corruption charges in 2016. Brazil is now governed by a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is the antithesis of Rousseff with his flagrant disregard for the rule of law and numerous sexist, racist, homophobic, and other derogatory comments.
The Dilma Rousseff Presidency outlines in detail how, despite the president (and her supporters’) best efforts to present an image of “motherliness,” the prevailing social narrative became one of incompetence, lack of feminine desirability, and dubious sexuality. The piece traces how Rousseff’s usage of the color white early on in her presidency and the word choices made in her speeches failed to overcome a negative counter-narrative that framed her as divorced from notions of “femininity.” Through the author’s lived experiences in Brazil during the final years of Rousseff’s presidency and numerous other sources, a picture is sketched of how media coverage, everyday jokes, political gaffes, TV parodies, and so forth, all came together to render Rousseff impeachable.
The article then compares speeches delivered by members of Congress as they justified their vote for Rousseff’s ouster from power to speeches delivered during Brazil’s last impeachment of Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992. Words like, “Brazil” (327 times), “God” (61 times), and “Wife” (18 times), were used consistently in Rousseff’s impeachment. Meanwhile, words such as, “Justice” (30 times), “Society” (69 times), and “Unemployment” (12 times) were used more frequently during Collor’s impeachment. I explain how this reveals a gendered element to Rousseff’s impeachment.
Overall, the 2016 impeachment process functioned as a sexist form of psychological and political violence against Brazilian women that attempted to reaffirm the centrality and power of men within politics. Likewise, it confirmed the persistence of patriarchal tendencies within society and need for continued social activism, despite the election of a female president. This intended messaging is best exemplified by Rousseff’s Vice-President Michel Temer, who chose an all-male cabinet to replace Rousseff’s after the impeachment.
It has now been over five years since the impeachment and Luís Roberto Barroso, a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, recently stated that with time it has become obviously clear that Rousseff’s impeachment had nothing to do with corruption. Nevertheless, it remains crucial that we reflect on the sexist, racist, homophobic, and other undertones that were employed during this political event. Moreover, making sense of the current moment of political violence that we are witnessing in Brazil – via Covid, indigenous dispossession, fiscal austerity, and so forth – requires interpreting Rousseff’s impeachment as a break in Brazil’s democratic consolidation that allowed for the subsequent rise of far-right military and machista figures to command the state.
Read the full article here: The Dilma Rousseff Presidency: From Motherly Discourses to Queer Impeachment
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José O. Pérez is a PhD candidate in Political Science at The Ohio State University (OSU), USA, with specializations in International Relations and Comparative Politics. He also holds a Master’s degree in International Strategic Studies from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, and was selected as a 2021 Diversity Fellow by the American Political Science Association (APSA). His Master’s thesis research focused on the experiences of Cuban medical professionals working within the Mais Médicos (“More Doctors”) exchange program in Brazil, primarily the role of gender, race, and biopolitics. His current research studies the impacts of refugee and migrant securitization policies in Latin America, examining how securitization impacts the lives of female and LGBT refugees in Brazil.