O politicamente correto conservador: homoafetividade em HQ da Marvel e seus efeitos polêmicos na Bienal do Rio 2019

Abstract

This study aims to investigate conservative political correctness and its potential to engage people in dissent. The polemical event analyzed involved conservatives and reformists in matters of custom surrounding the dispute over the representation of a homoaffective kiss in the comic book Vingadores: A Cruzada das Crianças (Heinberg and Cheung, 2016), which took place at the Bienal Internacional do Livro do Rio de Janeiro in 2019. The corpus selected for analysis consists of tweets, stenographic notes from speeches in a plenary of the Rio de Janeiro City Council, and a video published on YouTube. The dispute arose when Mayor Marcelo Crivella, labeling the same-sex kiss as inappropriate content and claiming to protect families and children, authorized the seizure of the books, a decision supported by councilman Isquierdo. This fact controversially engaged influencer Felipe Neto, four city councilors opposed to the decision, as well as various citizens who carried out practical acts of resistance (distribution and publication of books, an anti-censorship manifesto, a kiss-in, and a Book Caucus) against the mayor's attitude, which were analyzed. The analysis of the discursive acts was undertaken based on the theoretical-methodological framework of the Dialogical Analysis of Argumentation proposed by Lucas Nascimento (2018), which makes it possible to understand the argumentative phenomenon beyond agreement and consensus, thus contemplating polemical dialogism and the effects of meaning regarding same-sex affectivity. Regarding the analysis of practical acts, it was necessary to formulate propositions for understanding their conditions of possibility and their effects. To this end, I presented four hypotheses. The first and main hypothesis is that in Brazil, acts of discursive control, of artistic and behavioral representations, are carried out by the conservative wing, which I have termed conservative political correctness in customs, a practice that precedes what has been considered reformist political correctness, the former being hegemonic over the years, and therefore not classified. The second hypothesis refers to the fact that the controversy surrounding the Biennial was motivated by conservative political correctness regarding the issue of the homoaffectivity agenda. The third proposes that Crivella's attempted censorship, the first in the Biennial's history, was amplified by the conservative governing triad formed by Crivella (municipal), Wilson Witzel (state), and Bolsonaro (federal). Finally, I propose as a fourth hypothesis that a polemical act, discursive or practical, depending on how it is evaluated by opponents in a dispute in terms of social risk and lack of guarantee of rights, can trigger a practical act of resistance, which I have termed the polemical effect of peaceful resistance, whose aim is to demonstrate firmness of opinion and/or interrupt an ongoing action. At the end of the analytical process, among other results, I identified in the conservatives' enunciation the construction of a discursive ethos protective of family and children, and combative towards homoaffectivity, since this was considered an anti-model (argument) and its representation in comics capable of influencing the formation of children's sexuality, hence the attempt to prohibit the sale of copies. As for the reformist representatives, they also enunciated a combative ethos, but to interrupt and/or question an action considered contrary to the right to gender and sexuality equality, in addition to a censoring action. Therefore, they claimed the rule of justice (argument) in the treatment of affective representations of a kiss. In addition to these, other results were satisfactory in confirming the hypotheses presented in this thesis.