Bolsonarista or Nazi speech? Discursive materiality in political cartoons

Abstract

Throughout the government of Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro, there are several  mentions  that  associate  the  presidential  figure  with  a  Nazi  discourse  due  to  some  of  his  positions. According to Pêcheux (1988), the ideological instances are responsible for determining the images projected into society from a social and historical context. Like the news and reports, the cartoons have addressed several features that relate Bolsonaro’s discourse as belonging to Na-zism. Although it is not, for the most part, a direct mention, the ideological instances materialize this discourse through non-verbal language, that is, through the symbol of the swastika. Thus, this article aims to expose how cartoons used this resource to allude to the Nazi discourse linked to the Bolsonaro government. For this, we will select three graphic texts that go through the same Ideo-logical Formation and go through similar discursive foramisions. For methodological purposes, we will analyze cartoons that were published between January and May 2020, for being inserted within the same context and presenting a similar discourse. For the analysis, we start from the studies of the French Discourse Analysis.