Legitimation of hate and political violence through memetic imagesthe Bolsonaro campaign

  1. Concepción Fernández-Villanueva 1
  2. Gabriel Bayarri-Toscano 1
  1. 1 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Complutense de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR 02p0gd045

Revista:
Comunicación y sociedad = Communication & Society

ISSN: 2386-7876

Año de publicación: 2021

Título del ejemplar: Special Issue: Visual motifs and representations of power in the public sphere

Volumen: 34

Número: 2

Páginas: 449-468

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.15581/003.34.2.449-468 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Comunicación y sociedad = Communication & Society

Resumen

The federal elections were held in Brazil in 2018. The ballot resulted in a victory for the far-right candidate, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. The question that arose after the victory of the far-right was: How could this have happened? One of the instruments that undoubtedly contributed to this unexpected victory was a peculiar aspect of his political campaign: memetic communication. Through the use of memes in the social media (above all WhatsApp), Bolsonaro’s project transformed these violent discourses against political opponents, feminism, racialised persons and poverty into a series of discourses legitimised through humour and irony. It was a simplification through the memes affecting the static system of cognitive and metaphorical frameworks. During the pre-election period in 2018, we carried out digital ethnographic research in the WhatsApp groups of supporters of Bolsonaro’s project (“Bolsonarism”). In this period, we collected a sample of 132 memes belonging to WhatsApp groups composed of up to 256 members, who did not know each other and were geographically dispersed. The analysis we carried out demonstrates the trivialisation and legitimisation of violence against political opponents and other social groups. Much of this legitimisation was camouflaged under the mask of supposed humour and irony, which in reality was insulting, prejudicial and dehumanising.

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Fuente de los datos: Dialnet