Neoconservative escalation and the anti-gender agenda: the case of Brazil’s participation in the Budapest Demographic Summit

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the significance of Brazil’s participation in the 3rd Budapest Demographic Summit. This meeting follows a series of events that have taken place since 2015, through the rise of Viktor Orbán’s extreme right-wing administration. Seeking to tackle population decline, based on anti-immigration and pro-family strategies, the event has been positioning itself as a counterpoint to the UN Conferences. To that end, we began an online and documentary research on the website of Summit organizers and the Brazilian government, followed by a Critical Discourse Analysis (ACD) of the speech by Minister Damares Alves during the event, with reflections from post-structuralist feminist studies. A clear inflection to the global neoconservative and anti-gender agenda is observed in Brazil through the association with far-right countries, opposed to the defense of Human Rights, and fundamentalists. The speech included instrumentalized demographic notions used to camouflage ideological perspectives in relation to gender and launch attacks on sexual and reproductive rights and to non-traditional notions of family disguised as scientific discourse.