“Family” and Other Anti-Gender Strategies in Far Right Public Policy: The Cases of Jair Bolsonaro’s and Javier Milei’s Governments in Brazil and Argentina

Ultraconservative groups and populist governments have been challenging how sociologists investigate and analyze social phenomena for the past decade. Despite the theoretical challenge, sociologists have managed to map key standpoints which ideologically grant cohesion between different national contexts of right-wing populism. The anti-gender agenda seems to be one of the most constant ones. However, when these groups achieve to install populist governments, their anti-gender politics seem to translate into a quite diverse set of anti-gender policies. This paper presents data from Bolsonaro's government, taking Milei's case in Argentina as a counterbalancing example, in order to demonstrate diversity and specificities in the way the former Brazilian government approached "gender". The results have been developed over the past 5 years and focuses on findings of an ethnographic work which investigated the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights of Bolsonaro's government in Brazil. We analyzed the Ministry's discourse on the “family” - the data indicates that "women" and "family" were categories used part of discursive tactics which erased the term "gender" from Human Rights public policy in Brazil from 2019 to 2022. The main sources were the official laws and decrees that instated the Ministry and defined its functions and structures; metadata from the Ministry’s Youtube Channel; and extracted tweets both from the Minstry’s official account and from its head of office’s account. We also investigated the discourses promoted in a specific policy from this Ministry, called “Programa Famílias Fortes”, a parenting education program which promotes a particular view on the family – and on gender, sexuality, work, alcohol, drugs etc. – in order to namely “support family development”. Two key categories were proposed in order to better understand these anti-gender strategies, the idea of a “new grammar” of human rights and the concept of a “moral pedagogy of the family”.