A FAMILY'S MINISTRY: FROM GENDER MAINSTREAMING TO THE FAMILIARIZATION OF FEDERAL PUBLIC POLICIES
gender equality; backlash against gender; familism; neoconservatism;
neoliberalism; Bolsonaro’s government; human rights.
This thesis analyzes the activism against feminism and gender equality in Jair Bolsonaro’s
government (2019-2022). It investigates how this government, guided by a neoliberal and
neoconservative political rationality, promoted an agenda of familiarization of public
policies, based on fostering the traditional family as the basis of society and the
privatization of responsibilities for the development and survival of individuals centered
on the family. It also examines how this agenda is connected to the transnational backlash
against gender. It is detected that the governmentality that emerges from the combination
between those rationalities is founded on a single, restricted concept of family: the
traditional (nuclear, patriarchal, referentially white and cisheteronormative), based on
sexual difference. Thus, it is a kind of familism based on a limiting conception of the
feminine, reduced to the reproductive function and anchored in the conventional sexual
division of labor. The empirical analysis of this research was based on extensive desk
research of the Women, Family and Human Rights’ Ministry (WFHRM), an office which
mission was to mainstream the (traditional) family perspective. By examining the
structure, the actors, the use of the budget and the policies implemented, especially, by
its National Secretary of Policies for Women (NSPW) and National Secretary of the
Family (NSF), it was identified a reframing of the conception of human rights, which no
longer focuses on individuals but on the family. Concerning women, however, there was
a specificity, they were effectively mobilized by the WFHRM as a means to achieve a
goal: that the family should privately bear all the care needs. This was done so that the
State could be assigned only the economic and the (re)production of a traditional morality
functions. This project, it is argued, confronted basic democratic values such as equality,
plurality, respect for political antagonism, and freedom.