Paper short abstract:

As president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff confronted gender panics activated by conservative anxieties about her leadership and changing national culture of sexuality. This paper shows how rightwing cases for Rousseff's impeachment continually capitalized on gender panics in order to presume her guilt.

Paper long abstract:

Dilma Rousseff's tenure as president of Brazil witnessed remarkable shifts in the political public sphere around gender and sexuality. Cultural anxieties regarding this shift often swarmed around Rousseff herself, even as her government became increasingly risk-averse in promoting policies advocated by women's and LGBT social movements. Rousseff appeared to have a sustained if uneasy relationship with multiple symbols of female power ascribed to her. Her 2010 presidential campaign, for instance, embraced kinship imagery of her as "aunt" of Worker's Party development strategies. But it was only as Rousseff's sphere of influence became increasingly isolated within both her party and her government that Rousseff spoke more explicitly about the perils of being Brazil's first female president.

This presentation plots matrices of intelligibility that connected the constant buzz of gender and sexual unrest to changes in the partisan organization of political elites and ultimately to the isolation of Rousseff within the Brazilian political system. It thinks through both sides of the loss of power of the Worker's Party--not only conservative opposition fueled in part by anti-women and anti-LGBT reactionaries, but also the uncoupling of electoral strategists from feminist and queer (amongst other) social movements. Linking these sites of contestation during Rousseff's gradual loss of power, the paper examines how the evidence of Rousseff's improprieties were often confused with gender panics around her person.