BRAZILIAN FEMINIST

RESPONSES TO
ONLINE HATE SPEECH:
SEEING ONLINE VIOLENCE THROUGH
AN INTERSECTIONAL LENS

Horacio Sívori
Lorena Mochel
 01

Introduction

Brazilian women have always had a prominent role in global feminist

mobilisations. Over the past decade, street mobilisations such as the
Marcha das Vadias (Slut Walk)1 and hashtags such as “Chega de fiu fiu”
(No more catcalling) and “Meu primeiro assédio” (My first harassment)
generated intense engagement and increased the visibility of gender-
based violence in its variety of forms.2 That engagement and visibility
came to include, in 2018, the “Ele Não” (Not Him) movement against
presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, in the aftermath of the political
assassination of Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman Marielle Franco, attributed
to local militias with ostensive ties to the Bolsonaro family.

As we noted in an earlier report, the execution of Marielle, a Black,

feminist, bisexual woman raised in a favela and a movement leader, and
of her driver Anderson Gomes on 14 March 2018, marked a turning point
in public understandings of political violence. That crime also revealed,
as we noted:

[T]he role of gender, sexuality, race and class in the targeting of

a victim. In [its] aftermath, while street protests, in mourning,
demanded a thorough investigation, offensive memes and factoids
circulated on social media disputing police and press reports and
attacking [Marielle’s] reputation. The slogan Ele Não (“Not Him”)
condensed Bolsonaro’s deadly misogyny, authoritarianism and
disrespect for institutions. [At that time] on Twitter, #EleNão
and #EleNunca (Not Him, Not Ever), promoted by the Women
United Against Bolsonaro movement gained traction.3

1
Gomes, C., & Sorj, B. (2014). Corpo, geração e identidade: A Marcha das Vadias no Brasil. Sociedade e Estado, 29(2).
https://www.scielo.br/j/se/a/M3nBJJtyMYm4qd4TQdGpryR/?format=pdf&lang=pt
2 Almeida, H. B. (2019). From shame to visibility: Hashtag feminism and sexual violence in Brazil. Sexualidad Salud y Sociedad -
Revista Latinoamericana, 33, 19-41. https://www.scielo.br/j/sess/a/BhrLr74htzxgLK8BVtNW49z/?format=pdf&lang=en
3 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2021). Anti-rights discourse in Brazilian social media digital networks: Violence and sex politics. CLAM &
APC. https://firn.genderit.org/research/anti-rights-discourse-brazilian-social-media-digital-networks-violence-and-sex-politics;
Néris, N., Valente, M., Cruz, F. B. C., & Oliva, T. (2019). Outras Vozes: Gênero, raça, classe e sexualidade nas eleições de 2018.
InternetLab. https://www.internetlab.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/OutrasVozes_2018.pdf
 02

Twitter “elenao” user-hashtag network.4 The graph also shows the pro-Bolsonaro “ele sim” (yes him) hashtag in response.

It is our hypothesis that the brutality of Marielle’s assassination operated

as a critical event5 in the transformation of feminist debates on online
gender-based violence in Brazil. It brought to the centre of the national
political stage a dimension already raised by feminist voices in debates
on memory and justice in relation to victims of state violence: the
gendered character of political violence. “That image of extermination
inhabits us all,” one member of a transfeminist dyke editorial collective
said in a 2020 online Latin American Center on Sexuality and Human
Rights/Feminist Internet Research Network (CLAM/FIRN) seminar,
recorded on YouTube,6 recalling Marielle’s political assassination as a
turning point in Brazilian feminist mobilisations.

All acts of gender, sexuality or race-based violence are essentially political,

as they publicly express a will to power. Their intention is to punish
subjects for not conforming to their subordinate role, “to show them their
place,” or to eliminate identities, behaviours and expressions considered
unnatural.7 However, broader and more restricted definitions of hate
speech on the one hand, and of political violence on the other, reveal
conceptual distinctions and articulations between, and the overlap with,
misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism.

4 Sívori, H., et al. (2020). Anti-Feminist and Anti-LGBT Discourse Networks in Brazil: qualifying social media engagement around
the 2018 presidential election. SMART Data Sprint 2020. Digital Methods: theory-practice-critique. Project Report.
https://smart.inovamedialab.org/2020-digital-methods
5 Das, V. (2006). Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3SZ-46QisI&t=5148s
7
Gómez, M. M. (2006). Usos jerárquicos y excluyentes de la violencia. In C. Motta & L. Cabal (Eds.), Más Allá del Derecho:
Género y Justicia en América Latina. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, CESO, Centro de Derechos Reproductivos, Red Alas.
 03

The mobilisations in response to Marielle Franco’s assassination help

explain the development of a frame by feminists in Brazil and elsewhere
that interprets political violence in the light of the articulation of gender,
race and sexuality and gender expression. Acts of public violence
committed against Black women and queer and Indigenous people who
occupy positions in the institutional political field are understood not
only as motivated by partisan ideology, but predominantly marked those
intersectionalities. That intersectional understanding also frames the
interpretation of, and responses to, state-sponsored violence against the
largely racialised population of Indigenous, Black, quilombola, landless
peasant, working class, homeless and favela-dwellers. We argue that
those understandings and responses have been shaped by decades of
feminist struggle against gender-based violence. Significant for those
struggles have been the categories used for the naming different forms
of online violence.

In view of their becoming a political issue tout court, we set to explore

the changing meanings of those acts as they also came to be framed
as an intersectional feminist issue. For that purpose, in this article, we
consider public responses to online hate speech, as well as other forms
of online gender and sexuality-based violence in Brazilian social media
since the year of Bolsonaro’s election as president. We first discuss how
issues of gender and sexuality-based online violence and of hate speech
have been addressed in internet regulation debates in Brazil.

Then, to map the public meanings of this issue, we take a two-pronged

approach: from our empirical exploration, we explored narratives
addressing episodes of violence against women and LGBT+ people
mobilised among what we may call contemporary Brazilian feminist
and queer online counterpublics8 in social media. Finally, based on our
literature review, we bring the categories created to address online
violence in research reports, toolkits and other publications by feminist
and LGBTIQ+ civil society organisations. In our analysis, we elicit
how, from the point of view of feminist and queer social and political
actors with different forms of public engagement, race, gender, sexual
orientation and other markers of oppression shape digital dynamics
and vice-versa.

8 Friedman, E. J. (2017). Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America.
Oakland: University of California Press.
 04

Violence in internet regulation debates

“ The consequences of these great nineteenth-century moral paroxysms

are still with us. They have left a deep imprint on attitudes about sex,
medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police conduct,
and sex law (...) The notion that sex per se is harmful to the young
has been chiseled into extensive social and legal structures designed

”
to insulate minors from sexual knowledge and experience.9

Gayle Rubin’s remarks, originally proffered in 1982,not only remind us of

how sexual morality as a form of control has persisted in what she called
“new attitudes”. Her reference to the role of medicine, education and
police control also pinpoints the modern (colonial) discursive framework
that will be called upon once and again by conservative pastors, politicians
and other moral entrepreneurs to mobilise moral anxieties over sexuality.
Jeffrey Weeks identified those fears as the engine of sexual politics, that
is, the threats and anxieties that shaped the political moment of sex in
the 20th century.10 Moral panics are still relevant in order to grasp current
motivations for violence against LGBT+ persons and the role of reactionary
politics as the milieu where that violence arises.

In a report for APC’s EROTICS research project, over a decade ago,11 we

identified a moral panic about online child sexual abuse as the main
public concern in early Brazilian parliamentary debates about internet
regulation.12 According to Carolina Parreiras,13 a few years after, child
pornography and digital piracy had already become the main issues that
shaped public discourse and set legal standards on digital security and
internet regulation in the country. Beatriz Accioly Lins,14 in turn, read
popular and experts’ anxiety over the leak of “nudes” on the internet as

9
Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. In C. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora Press.
10 Weeks, J. (1977). Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet.

11 Corrêa, S., et al. (2011). Internet regulation and sexual politics in Brazil. In Kee, J. (Ed.), EROTICS: Sex, rights and the internet.

APC. https://www.apc.org/sites/default/files/EROTICS_0.pdf
12 Lowenkron, L. (2010). Abuso sexual infantil, exploração sexual de crianças, pedofilia: diferentes nomes, diferentes

problemas? Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad - Revista Latinoamericana, 5, 9-29. https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/

SexualidadSaludySociedad/article/view/394/804
13 Parreiras, C. (2015). Altporn, corpos, categorias, espaços e redes: um estudo etnográfico sobre pornografia online.

PhD Thesis, State University of Campinas, São Paulo.

14 Lins, B. A. (2019). Caiu na rede: mulheres, tecnologias e direitos entre nudes e (possíveis) vazamentos.

PhD Thesis. University of São Paulo.

 05

a trigger for contemporary forms of blaming women for their sexuality.

Intriguingly over the same period, “hashtag feminism” has arguably
transformed the ways women’s movements organise, communicate and
represent themselves in the Brazilian public arena.15

In turn, increasingly over the successive electoral periods since 2015,

communications activists and experts have highlighted two issues: digital
security and the role of digital communications in political campaigning.
As we claimed in our earlier FIRN report,16 among ultra-conservatives,
shameless slander, overt homophobia, misogyny and racism operate as a
primary political language. The Responsibility for Internet Freedom and
Transparency Bill (PL 2630/20), better known as the “Fake News Bill”,17
has transited the Brazilian Congress since 2020. That bill also constitutes
a so far unsuccessful attempt to address the issue of online hate speech.

According to Brazilian anthropologist Leticia Cesarino,18 in the context of

a “crisis of confidence” that affects all forms of public representation,
undermining the institutionality of science, democratic debate and the rule
of law, the “neoliberal architecture of digital media” has favoured what
the author has termed as a sort of “digital populism,” whereby political
antagonism is exacerbated by “the performative power of social media
to remake political identities.”19 This form of political engagement and
movement-making was instrumental to Bolsonaro’s election as president
in 2018 and has contributed to the transformation of the Brazilian social
media sphere into an environment increasingly hostile toward minorities
and feminist and LGBT+ activists in particular.

Arguably, anti-gender panics have been instrumental to a deep tilt

towards the far right across the West, and in the Americas in particular.20

15 Gomes, C., & Sorj, B. (2014). Op. cit.

Ferreira, C. B. (2015). Feminisms on the web: Lines and forms of action in contemporary feminist debate. Cadernos Pagu (44),
199-228. https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cadpagu/article/view/8637329/5098;
Piscitelli, A. (2017). “#queroviajarsozinhasemmedo”: New registers of the relations between tourism, gender and violence in
Brazil. Cadernos Pagu (50). https://www.scielo.br/j/cpa/a/LyQtLJcG7mMd6qB6fbN9QFR/?format=pdf&lang=en;
Almeida. (2019). Op. cit.
16 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2021). Op. cit.

17 Brasil, Câmara dos Deputados. (2020). Projeto de Lei PL 2630/2020 e seus apensados. https://www.camara.leg.br/propostas-

legislativas/2256735
18 Cesarino, L. (2021). Pós-Verdade e a Crise do Sistema de Peritos: uma explicação cibernética. Ilha - Revista de Antropologia,

23(1), 73-96. https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ilha/article/view/75630/45501

19 Cesarino, L. (2020, 14 September). When Brazil’s Voters Became Followers. Anthropology News. https://www.anthropology-

news.org/articles/when-brazils-voters-became-followers-2/
20 Paternotte, D., & Kuhar, R. Eds (2018). Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilising against Equality. Lanham MD, Rowman

& Littlefield. Corrêa, S. Ed. Anti-Gender politics in Latin America. Country Case Studies Summaries Rio de Janeiro: ABIA, 2020,
47-65, http://sxpolitics.org/GPAL/uploads/E-book-Resumos-completo.pdf
 06

Right-wing populists mobilise anti-gender discourse to construe feminist

and LGBT+ people as enemies of “nation” and “family”. Social media
platforms have provided an effective medium for mobilising misogyny
and homo-lesbo-transphobia as an increasingly legitimate political
language. At the receiver’s end of that hostility, hate speech and
prejudice condemn the status of minorities as morally inferior, producing
forms of material and symbolic violence that reveal the workings of
their oppression.

In their literature review for APC’s mapping of research on gender and

digital technology, Anri van der Spuy and Namita Aavriti claim that “[i]n
the 2000s, the work carried out online by feminist groups and women’s
movements on forms of online gender-based violence was responsible
for shifting the focus away from looking only at the emancipatory potential
of technology.”21 In the context of a new rise of anti-gender politics
as unbound hostility against feminism, LGBT+ identities and sexual and
reproductive rights, those mobilisations took place originally as responses
to online and offline gender-based violence, read as seamlessly connected.
In this article, we turn to recent Brazilian feminist research on gender
and sexuality-based violence and digital technologies to address the link
between those politics, that public hostility, and the way gender and
sexuality-based violence is understood and conceptualised by Brazilian
feminist and queer activist researchers. We ask, more specifically, how
those conceptions have been transformed by the alliances, disputes,
displacements and arrangements taking place after 2018.

In line with Sonia Álvarez’s insights about creation of a diverse yet somewhat
unified “discursive field of action” of Latin American feminist activism,22
we explored how Brazilian women’s queer feminist, transfeminist, hashtag
feminist voices and bodies are producing knowledge about the role of
gender, sexuality, race, class in violence against women and LGBT+ on
digital media. In an earlier report we advanced a hypothesis about
the constitutive role of political disputes (namely the 2018 and 2020
electoral processes and the governmental response to the new coronavirus
pandemic) with regard to the hostility against feminists and LGBT+ that
we documented.23 That led us to further interrogate that connection,

21 Van der Spuy, A., & Aavriti, N. (2018). Mapping research in gender and digital technology. Association for Progressive
Communications. https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/mapping-research-gender-and-digital-technology
22
Álvarez, S. (2014). Para além da sociedade civil: reflexões sobre o campo feminista. Cadernos Pagu, 43, 13-56.
https://www.scielo.br/j/cpa/a/9Y7dMKrDrFSGDyCJLW45Gpw/?format=pdf&lang=pt
23 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2021). Op. cit.
 07

captured by a broad definition of gender and sexuality-based political

violence. More specifically, within that perspective, in this article we survey
intersectional understandings of misogyny and LGBT+phobia in the
same period.

After verifying a gap in academic research on online gender and sexuality-

based violence about the role of disputes in the public sphere as a
motivation for that type of violence, we chose to concentrate on research
and interventions by activist networks and organisations. Our selection
privileged document sources authored or sponsored by Brazilian civil
society organisations, in the form of reports, guides, brochures and
dossiers. In order to address the larger issue of the role of violence and
technology in Brazilian feminist and queer contemporary mobilisations,
our main guiding questions are: how is intersectionality in online violence
experienced and conceived; and in what ways the visibility and public
recognition recently achieved by Black women and trans persons have
shaped emerging forms of, and responses to, online violence.

From “hate speech” to “political violence”

Communication law scholarship and policy debates have addressed current

gaps in the constitutional definitions of online hate speech, whether it
should be protected by the principle of freedom of expression, how
context, intention and medium should weigh in its characterisation as such,
who should be responsible for the protection of its victims, and by what
legal means. The transnational reach of social media platforms and their
configuration as global corporations point to the limitations of national
legal frameworks and to the challenge of making them accountable to
international human rights laws.24 As highlighted by Brazilian sociologist
and legal scholar Yasmin Curzi in her entry on hate speech for a Glossary
of Platform Law, for some scholars and social movements, “the debate
around hate speech should be centered on how some groups in society
are being historically silenced and are powerless against several violations
– such as women, non-white men, and other minorities.”25

24 Silva, B. M. (2020). Discurso de ódio nas normativas transnacionais de empresas de mídias sociais: Uma abordagem acerca das
possibilidades da autorregulação regulada. Brazilian Journal of International Relations, 9(2), 406-433.
25 Curzi, Y. (2021). Hate Speech. In L. Belli, N. Zingales, & Y. Curzi (Eds.), Glossary of Platform Law and Policy Terms. Rio de Janeiro:

FGV Direito Rio. https://hdl.handle.net/10438/31365

 08

The evidence about online injurious speech against feminists and LGBT+
persons gathered in our earlier report reveals such imbalance.26 As Judith
Butler claims in her indispensable volume Excitable Speech,27 drawing
from J. L. Austin’s speech act theory,28 our bodies and identities are
constituted by language. The necessary act of naming may paradoxically
insult, diminish, destroy. This is in effect the case in online hate speech. In
interviews conducted for this research, narratives showed no distinction
or emphasised a conceptual continuum between the injury performed
against them on social media platforms based on their gender, sexuality,
race and feminist politics, and any offline version of themselves and
how their body felt.

In our research, political violence serves as a frame of reference for

a reflection about specific forms of politicisation adopted by feminist
agendas in Brazil. However, such perspective does not constitute, in
turn, the establishment of a hierarchy between different types of violence,
but interrogates aspects, dimensions and nuances that emerge in feminist
debates, as well as a confluence of interests and an opportunity to qualify
our approach to this complexity. In that vein, this article addresses the
general issue of how contemporary Brazilian feminisms conceive online
gender-based violence; what shifts and transformations occurred in the
public meanings of this category; and related to what mobilisations.

Methods

Our previous report focused on online episodes that illustrate social

media engagement in response to homophobic hate speech by or
attributed to Bolsonaro. In an online survey and subsequent interviews,
our research also explored the reception of, and responses to, public
hostility against feminists and LGTB+ persons.29 In this paper we further
interrogate the intersectional nature of that sort of online violence.
Some attacks, particularly those against public figures, in turn prompted

26 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2021). Op. cit.

27
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
28 Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

29 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2021). Op. cit.

 09

online mobilisation in defence and vindication of feminist and queer

victims of hate speech. A majority of those episodes, since the year
of Bolsonaro’s election, took place on Instagram and Twitter and had
emerged in our online ethnography of feminist, queer and anti-gender
networks during that period. As an illustration, we briefly discuss two
cases that show changes in the public meanings of online gender-based
violence, collectively produced by public figures, social organisations
and social media users who engage social media as feminist and queer-
identified individuals and allies.

We selected the case of Lola Aronovich, a university professor of

Argentine origin residing in northeastern Brazil, known for her feminist
blog “Escreva Lola Escreva” (Write Lola Write), created in 2008. 30
“Native of the internet”, her case as victim of a defamation campaign
on and offline, as well as of offline death threats, is emblematic of the
connections between, and evolving understandings of, anti-feminist hate
speech and other forms of online violence against women in Brazil. Her
resistance inspired the passing of Federal Act 13.642/2018, the “Lola
Aronovich Law” in 2018,31 enabling the Federal Police to investigate the
online dissemination of misogynous content. Our second case is about
Benny Briolly, a trans councilwoman in the city of Niteroi, State of Rio
de Janeiro, who in 2022 became the target of a hate campaign because
of her defence of Afro-Brazilian religion. Her case, characterised as one
of religious racism and transphobia, is also a story of online community
mobilisation for the survival of victims of such dehumanising violence.

After verifying the scarcity of references to the public sphere disputes

(other than those related to the legal internet regulation framework)
in academic research on online gender-based violence, we chose to
explore the production and circulation of data related to this category
in feminist productions that introduce an intersectional perspective,
i.e., one that articulates race and sexuality in their gender analysis. To
elicit the concepts and practices that guide civil society responses to
online violence, we conducted an online mapping and review exercise.
We started with online searches carried out on the websites, blogs and
platform profiles maintained by feminist organisations, networks and
collectives that invest in issues of digital media and information and
communication technologies.

30 https://escrevalolaescreva.blogspot.com/
31 https://www2.camara.leg.br/legin/fed/lei/2018/lei-13642-3-abril-2018-786403-publicacaooriginal-155161-pl.html
 10

The field of Brazilian feminist news agencies and alternative media is

vast and there are many research centres, organisations and networks.
Several of them generate data on the internet as their priority, in
perspectives whose scope they identify as feminist or relative to gender,
LGTB+ or other descriptors of sexual diversity. Feminist hashtags and
campaigns during this period also guided our collection of sources.
This is the case of the Marielle Franco Institute, created after the
assassination of the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman. This collective is
representative of a form of public intervention that has been gaining
ground in the digital feminist field of action, that is, the production
of data on violence that articulates gender to other social markers of
difference, in particular race, class and sexuality.

This flow led us to a scope of feminist perspectives that share a common

investment in intersectional analyses. This focus allowed us, in turn, to
interrogate the variety of classifications, themes and intersectionalities
addressed in the documents selected, that is, how different feminisms
operating in the digital field generate specific classifications. To privilege
the diversity with that field, we took into account criteria of sexual identity,
gender expression, race/colour and regional representation within Brazil.32

Our corpus of literature is made of research reports, brochures, guides

and dossiers located by search using isolated terms and further
combining descriptors such as “violence”, “LGBTphobia” and “digital”,
among other variations. We noticed that some websites had pre-set
combinations of some of our chosen categories, alerting us about their
relevance in popular searches or the organisation’s priorities. That was
the case with “online gender violence”, “domestic violence”, family
violence”, “sexual violence”, “femicide”, “racism” and “LGBTphobia”.
Although other contents of the websites, blogs and profiles visited
were not within our analytical scope, their study can provide insights
about emerging mobilisations within this feminist “counterpublic”
or “discursive field of action”. This fact is no less relevant, insofar as it
suggests the consolidation of an agenda of (broadly defined) feminist
engagement with digital technologies. Nevertheless, our specific aim is
to grasp the ways in which online violence is discussed in documents
produced by feminist and LGBT+ mobilisations on the intersection of
gender, race and sexuality in digital technologies.

32 See a list of the selected sources at the end of this article.

 11

Our final selection included documents that address violence against

feminists and LGBTphobia over the period between 2018 and 2022.
Those found explored two main thematic cores: elections and digital
security. This core, in turn, does not only address events involving
candidates for public office, although most of the works take that approach.
We acknowledge that, like in all research, our choice of actors and search
categories has limitations. Our approach, in turn, followed the pathways
developed by actors in the field of Brazilian feminist internet research,
as represented in our corpus, to generate knowledge about gender,
sexuality, race and violence in digital technologies.

In general, as the authors of one of the reports in our corpus of analysis

indicate, public data on LGBT+ people is scarce in the country, and
historically based on “media analysis and information gathered mainly by
means of network support and contacts.”33 We corroborate that report’s
argument that the lack of a larger, better qualified body of quantitative
data on the LGBT+ population in Brazil complicates the selection criteria
for the research target.34 Samples are often assembled either by indirect
means or by intentional selection, as was the case with our own online
survey for this and earlier APC research partnerships.35 However, it is worth
mentioning that official reports produced by the federal government and
international organizations are often based on data gathered by those
same Brazilian feminist and LGBT+ activist organisations and collectives.36

Our initial searches started from previously cited sources and our own
contact networks, Google, some academic platforms and cross-references
in the files we catalogued. At a second moment, for the direct search
of documents, we selected the platform profiles and websites of civil
society organisations or NGOs and institutes. We excluded results
corresponding to journalistic reports, as well as documents that were
not authored by the organisation hosting it in their website or blog, or
originally produced outside the period before Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential
campaign. Another exclusion criterion was for documents that, despite

33 Gênero e Número. (2021). Violência contra LGBT+s nos contextos eleitoral e pós-eleitoral.
http://violencialgbt.com.br/dados/190321_relatorio_LGBT_V1.pdf
34
Carrara, S., & Ramos, S. (2005). Política, direitos, violência e homossexualidade. Pesquisa 9a Parada do Orgulho GLBT - Rio
2004. Rio de Janeiro: CEPESC. http://www.clam.org.br/uploads/arquivo/paradasp_2005.pdf
35 Sívori, H. F., & Zilli, B. (2017). Sexuality and the internet: 2017 survey findings. In M. Palumbo, & D. S. Sienra (Eds.), EROTICS

Global Survey 2017: Sexuality, rights and internet regulations.

https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/erotics-global-survey-2017-sexuality-rights-and-internet-regulations
36
In 2022, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) included a field for sexual orientation for the first time in its
household survey forms.
 12

using the term “digital” or mentioning information and communication

technologies, did not address them in their analysis.

Correspondences addressing our particular analytical interest in LGBT-

phobia online emerged among organisations whose projects are carried
out individually or in coalition with other groups. The denominations
and formats in which research results are shared and interventions are
conceived are varied. Dissemination takes place mostly through their
networks and as the result of partnerships with national and international
feminist and human rights organisations. Despite their diversity, feminist
and LGBT+ data and mobilisations are concentrated in the south and
southeast, the more urban, richest regions of Brazil. As the critique by
Black, lesbian, queer and mestizo feminist thought to the universality of
the category “woman”,37 which came to be known as intersectionality,38
has shown, the analysis of how differences become inequalities must
address social class as one among other articulators of violence.39

The intersectional tale of online gender-based violence

against feminist and queer public figures

Write Lola, Write

As part of our research project, in late 2020, we conducted in-depth

interviews over Zoom with volunteers, on digital engagement, violence
and the internet. All interviewees narrated an overwhelming feeling of
discomfort and helplessness with regard to verbal violence and hostility
against feminists and queers, which had worsened since the 2018 general
election and into the COVID-19 pandemic. The electoral mobilisation
of anti-gender discourse and sex panics seemed as intense as before

37 Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute; Davis, A. (1981). Women, race and
class. APA, 6th edition.
38 Crenshaw, K. W. (2002). Documento para o encontro de especialistas em aspectos da discriminação racial relativo ao gênero.

Estudos Feministas, 10, 171-188. https://www.scielo.br/j/ref/a/mbTpP4SFXPnJZ397j8fSBQQ/?format=pdf&lang=p

39 Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London/New York: Routledge.
 13

and during the 2020 municipal elections that had just taken place. In that
regard, a 29-year-old bisexual woman of Japanese background from a
metropolitan area in southern Brazil narrated attacks by the men in her
family who banded in support of the offensive comments in response
to her politically progressive posts. That had made her quit Facebook for
some time and since then her access has been only sporadic. Speaking
about those negative experiences, she recalled the ordeals other people
went through, particularly public figures. She mentioned the case of
Lola Aronovich, the university professor and feminist blogger who years
before had been the victim of especially virulent attacks by haters.

Earlier on, in our field observation notes about the online repercussion
of a homophobic quote attributed to Bolsonaro during the first year
of the COVID-19 pandemic, described in an earlier paper,40 we wrote
(slightly adapted):

An icon of Brazilian online feminism tweeted about the episode

with significant repercussion. Lola Aronovich (@lolaescreva), who
has been under attack by haters, including several death threats,
tweeted: “There is no #fagthing. What there is an incompetent,
homophobic, negationist president who only gives the worst
example. He is the world’s worst leader in the fight against the
pandemic. Hopefully soon he will be tried for genocide in an
international court and held accountable for the deaths.”41

Source: Twitter

40 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2022). Covid-19, Homophobia and the Bolsonarista Vernacular: Hate speech on Brazilian social media.
Feminist by Design: APRIA Journal #4. https://apria.artez.nl/covid-19-homophobia-and-the-bolsonarista-vernacular/
(The description of this case was finally not included in that paper.)
41 https://twitter.com/lolaescreva/status/1280923532583714819?s=20
 14

Not unlike other feminists and queer subjects, our female interviewee’s
narrative of male relatives’ verbal attacks on Facebook connects to
Lola’s tale at different levels. To her, in a direct manner, it illustrates
the pervasive atmosphere of insecurity generated by relentless attacks
and a sort of hostility that, as for other interviewees, is critically present
in the intimacy of their family, church, work and school online networks
and, due to the primary character of those networks, populated by family
and peers, inevitably, splashes into offline spaces. That leads them either
to avoid social media altogether or to the also frequent self-policing of
contents shared, in order to avoid conflict.

On another level, her empathy with Lola’s ordeal establishes a bond,

a sense of community whereby an individual traumatic experience –
in our interviewee’s case intersected by her identity as an educated
Brazilian of Japanese descent,42 female, bisexual, left-wing feminist
– acquires public meaning, further materialised by participating in a
research interview about violence and online feminist engagement.
Furthermore, Lola’s decade-long record as a pioneer of feminist blogs
places both narratives in the time perspective of Brazilian web-feminist
movement building.

Religious racism

In the municipal elections of 2020, Benny Briolly was elected

councilwoman for Niterói, the second largest city in the State of Rio
de Janeiro, with the highest count of votes. She is not the first Black
transgender person to be elected for a legislative post in Brazil but, like
others, she was forced to leave the country after receiving numerous
death threats of racist and transphobic content. According to a survey
by the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA),
among trans elected officials, 80% said “they did not feel safe to hold
their positions”.43

After her return to Brazil in 2022 to occupy her seat as councilwoman,

she was part of the movement to promote PL 09/2022, a bill that

42 The social status of Brazilians of Japanese descent who migrated to southeastern Brazil since the turn of the 20th century is
predominantly equated to that of white European settlers, sharing equivalent privileges as farmers and qualified professionals
or, today, part of the urban middleclass.
43 Benevides, B. G., & Nogueira, S. N. B. (2021) Dossiê dos assassinatos e da violência contra travestis e transexuais brasileiras em

2020. São Paulo: Expressão Popular, ANTRA, IBTE.

https://antrabrasil.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/dossie-trans-2021-29jan2021.pdf
 15

institutes Maria Mulambo Day, after an Umbanda (Afro-Brazilian religion)

sacred entity that would thereby be declared protector of the city. When
she took the chamber floor to argue in favour of the bill while holding a
sculpture of Maria Mulambo, Briolly was booed and shouted at by other
councilmen and by protestors, who told her to “Go away!” as “Jesus is the
Lord of Niterói”. After that, the controversy continued over social media.
The Black trans councilwoman’s profiles became the target of attacks
orchestrated by religious intolerance, mostly from Christian conservative
evangelicals. However, our focus here will not be the content of posts
against her or in her support. We are interested, rather, in the way she
mobilised the violence by which she was being targeted in her own
social media networks. She set out to use that hostility against her as
ammunition to combat religious racism and transphobia on Twitter and
Instagram, as she had been doing throughout her mandate. That is, she
gave a name to the violence to which she had been subjected.

Credit: Priscila da Cunha44

The day after she was verbally attacked in the council chamber, Briolly,
who was used to denouncing the death threats she had constantly
received since the beginning of her mandate, shared her speech in her
social media profiles. Many clips were edited by followers, matching
her voice with Afro-Brazilian chants in the background. In addition to

44 https://prisciladacunha.com.br/
 16

a cascade of supportive comments and the creation of hashtags such

as #intoleranciareligiosa (religious intolerance) and #racismoreligioso
(religious racism), the movement mobilised artists (image below), adding
to the online chorus that denounced the intersectional sort of violence
unleashed on the councilwoman.

Source: Instagram45

The episode was picked up by Veja, a nationwide news magazine that

featured a studio photo of Benny (reproduced here from Benny Briolly’s
Instagram) and an extensive quote by her, narrating the verbal attack by
a fellow councilman (not reproduced here). Her original speech at the
chamber was in defence of the secular state, but the engagement created
on Instagram around her figure after her response to the aggression is
emblematic of the intersectionalities at play both in the deployment of
hate speech against minority candidates and in the collective response
it produced. The attack against her was a racist attack against o Povo

45 The post reads: “It’s in the news! I will not bend my head down. Giving up is not, never was and never will be an option. The
oppression of a sexist, transphobic and misogynist society only makes me want to offer my body, my politics and my struggle
to my people, the Black people, the LGBT+ population, the favela people and all those who somehow have been historically
silenced or made invisible. [...] I really believe that Rio de Janeiro will be all ours and not theirs. [dark brown raised fist]
https://www.instagram.com/p/CeFC8Wyp35O/
 17

de Santo (followers of Afro Brazilian religions), but it was primarily

lesbophobic in content (which we choose to not reproduce here for its
offensiveness). Such intersectionalities are shaping the ways in which
Brazilian feminisms create collective discourse and forge connections
based on affect with politically engaged publics on social media.

The intersectionalities of “political violence” on digital media

In this iteration of our research, we interrogate how feminist research and

interventions in digital technologies conceive online violence against
LGBT+s in the contemporary political scenario, from 2018 to 2021. The
word cloud below, featuring the most used categories in our corpus of
analysis, points to some present shifts shown in the meanings attributed
to violence in feminist mobilisations:

Word cloud of terms from the corpus of reports, guides and brochures compiled for this review.46
Source: Own elaboration. Tool: https://wordart.com/

46 See list at the end of this article.

 18

Political violence is an emerging theme that runs through a corpus of

recent civil society reports, guides and brochures, classified in different
subcategories. One of them is “electoral violence,” which distinctively
affects minority groups. The Marielle Franco Institute report cites an
effort to promote a debate on electoral political violence against Black
women.47 On the other hand, an effort on behalf of Black women
elected candidates to leverage the expansion of the debate on the
intersectionality of gender-based violence, has led to the term race and
gender-based political violence.48

In some of the documents, distinctions are drawn between political

violence and electoral violence related to elections and party disputes.
In others, such as the Monitora report,49 “political violence” has a larger
scope, referring to the field of political rights in a broader sense, as actions
intended to impede women from accessing political representation
in public life. The report introduces the term based on international
declarations, such as that of the Organization of American States and
partner entities.

Parts of the selected documents do not feature “online violence” as

a central category. In the case of the report by the Marielle Franco
Institute,50 the violence addressed is that which affects Black candidates,
regardless of the medium, intersected by LGBT+phobia as part of the
interpretive framework that the authors put forward. “Virtual violence” is
referred to as one of the modalities of gender and race-based political
violence, alongside with others such as moral and psychological, physical,
sexual, institutional, racial, gender and LGBT+phobic violence. Arguably
that categorisation as a distinct type of violence is bound to the period
when the research was carried out. “Virtual violence” came to occupy a
more prominent place for candidates later on, when political campaigns
became massively digital – or exclusively, as in the case of the 2020
municipal elections after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The “Elections and internet” guide,51 by Coding Rights, in turn, affiliates the
term to technical notes that contribute to the proposal of constitutional

47 Instituto Marielle Franco. (2020). A Violência Política Contra Mulheres Negras: Eleições 2020. https://www2.camara.leg.br/
atividadelegislativa/comissoes/comissoes-permanentes/cdhm/arquivos/pesquisainstituto-marielle-franco
48
Petrone, T., de Jesús, A., Malunguinho, É., Francisco, M., Souza, R., & Monteiro, D. (2020, 18 November). A violência política
contra parlamentares negras. Folha de São Paulo. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/opiniao/2020/11/a-violencia-politica-contra-
parlamentares-negras.shtml
49
Azmina & InternetLab. (2021). MonitorA: Report on online political violence on the pages and profiles of candidates in the 2020
municipal elections. https://www.internetlab.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/5P_Relatorio_MonitorA-ENG.pdf
50
Instituto Marielle Franco. (2020). Op. cit.
51
Souza, L, & Varon, J. (2021). Eleições e internet: Guia para proteção de direitos nas campanhas eleitorais. Coding Rights.
https://www.codingrights.org/docs/eleicoes&internet.pdf
 19

amendments (PEC). That strategy suggests the various institutional levels

involved in the effort made by the authors to expand the scope of political
violence beyond the electoral process. By enunciating “digital political
violence and its intersectionalities”, the guide indicates how these paths
relate to LGBT+phobia insofar as the most affected candidates are
groups that are vulnerable due to gender, race and sexual orientation.
Hate speech, the most common category in previous documents, is
identified here as a form of political violence. The Coding Rights guide
makes us realise how this and other categories are mobilised as a way of
exercising violence against candidates. In the guide, political violence is
linked to LGBT+phobia, racism and ageism. Political violence is different
from hate speech and may intersect with it.

All documents build on pre-2018 intersectional understandings of online

violence. Current works reinforce this conceptual frame at identifying the
intersections between specific markers of difference mobilised by the
digitally mediated aggressions that surged with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro.
This line of interpretation increases understanding of how, in cases such
as that of Councilwoman Benny Briolly, the deployment of violence
with the intent of resolving a public controversy raised in the context
of an institutional process, in this case at a city legislature, activates the
intersection of gender, race (coded by proxy as religion), and sexuality
(here coded as gender expression).

Arguably, the opposite is also true: when exercised against minorities,

the intersectionalities involved are structurally constitutive of political
violence. When it is claimed that race, gender and sexuality operate
intersectionality, it means that they are mutually constitutive in their
operation, as they have come to be in episodes of online violence and
political violence marked by race, gender and sexuality.

We interpret a shift in the semantic field of political violence as a result of

the effort to systematise narratives of digitally mediated violence against
Black and LGBT+ candidates and elected officials after 2018. While
the sorts of online violence that affect LGBT+ persons are recognised
as having increased during the recent electoral periods, divergences
in the choice of core categories point to different emphases and
nuances in its conceptual approach, as well as in the kind of identity
politics. Furthermore, they expose the challenges faced by subject
social categories that embody different markers of difference and social
 20

hierarchies. Nevertheless, as the cases above also show, although often

limited and disputed, the internet also offers ways to respond to physical
and verbal politically motivated attacks.

While they too deal with the electoral landscape, other analytical claims
and contributions are made to the naming of online violence. The report
on “Violence against LGBT+s in electoral and post-electoral contexts”52
refers more directly to what it calls an “escalation of violence” against
sexual minorities after Bolsonaro came to office. The choice of the term
“escalation” reflects on the perception of an increase in violence
performed not only by or against certain political actors as members
of specific subject categories, as in the conventional restricted use of
“political violence,” but to a broadly generalised hostile environment,
identified as a type of violence different from those practised in other
historical periods. In addition, the report cites how the engagement with
hashtags such as #EleNão, cited by us in an earlier paper,53 and banners
such as “LGBTs against Bolsonaro” showed forms of involvement with
the elections that are not limited to party politics.

The report, “Dyke visibility online: Between violence and solidarity”54

introduces the concept of a “virtual lesbian existence” as an opportunity
to leave invisibility behind to occupy a space in digital networks. The
voices of six Black and white lesbian women, some of them involved
in party politics, tell about the difficulties they faced on social media,
such as having their images and texts associated by algorithms with
pornography, or the blocking words like “lesbian” or “dyke” from their
posts and searches. Similarly to the LGBT+ report mentioned above,
political violence is not the prioritised category here.

Unlike narratives that refer to political violence marked by gender and

race as a way of confronting gendered and racialised violence against
candidates, violence against LGBT+ persons is portrayed as a constant
that merely escalated in the electoral period. Despite efforts to depart
from its persistent equation to electoral violence, we notice that the term
is just not used in reports that prioritise violence against LGBT+ persons.
When the electoral landscape is addressed, it is not in order to analyse
the cases of candidates or elected officials; therefore there is no overlap
with conventional restricted understandings of political violence.

52 Gênero e Número. (2021). Op. cit.

53 Sívori, H., & Zilli, B. (2021). Op. cit.
54 Figueiredo, I., & Varon, J. (2020). Visibilidade sapatão nas redes: Entre violência e solidariedade. São Paulo: Coding Rights.

https://codingrights.org/docs/visibilidade_sapatao.pdf
 21

In conclusion

From our perspective, looking at the transformation of categories created

to generate knowledge and interventions about online violence marked
by gender and sexuality can provide a significant interpretation of
contemporary challenges to a feminist internet. In this article we brought
interrogations raised in our empirical exploration of the meaning of
online anti-feminist and anti-LGBT+ hate speech in Brazilian social media
over the past two electoral periods and into the COVID-19 pandemic.
The categories in our corpus of analysis represent a certain degree of
articulation between online hate speech and gender-based violence in
particular and to political violence in general. Responses to an online
environment hostile to those social and political categories, in particular
in the contemporary electoral mediascape, have been transformed by
the ways in which Brazilian feminisms (including Black feminism, queer-
feminism and transfeminism) understand and produce knowledge about
online violence.

In line with FIRN’s acknowledgement of feminists’ pioneering role in

the change of focus away from the emancipatory potential of digital
technologies and in the production of insights about the continuity
between online and offline violence, Brazilian feminist denunciations of
the ineffectiveness of current legal frameworks and lack of accountability
by large platforms for providing protection against (ever intensifying)
violence are ways of creating and circulating knowledge produced at
this intersection. In that conjuncture, the construct of intersectionality has
allowed online and offline feminist and queer communities and people
of colour to reappropriate their gendering, racialisation and sexual
identities as forms of affirmation and resistance.
 22

Documents reviewed

Source / translation Year Institutional Document type

authorship or
sponsorship

Como documentar casos de 2020 Acoso Online Handbook/

violência de gênero na internet Brochure
de forma empática e segura? Um
guia prático baseado na difusão de
material íntimo sem consentimento

How to document cases of gender

violence on the internet in an
empathic and safe way? A practical
guide based on the dissemination of
intimate material without consent

https://acoso.online/site2022/
wp-content/uploads/2020/10/
documentación_portugues.pdf

Eleições e Internet: Guia para 2020 Coalizão Direitos Handbook/

proteção de direitos nas campanhas na Rede (Coding Brochure
eleitorais Rights and Me
Representa)
Elections and the Internet: Guide
for the protection of rights during
electoral campaigns

https://www.codingrights.org/docs/
eleicoes&internet.pdf

Instituto Marielle Franco. (2020). A 2020 Instituto Marielle Research report

Violência Política Contra Mulheres Franco, Justiça
Negras: Eleições 2020 Global, Terra de
Direitos
Political Violence against Black
Women: The 2020 Elections

https://www2.camara.leg.br/
atividadelegislativa/comissoes/
comissoes-permanentes/cdhm/
arquivos/pesquisainstituto-marielle-
franco
 23

Source / translation Year Institutional Document type

authorship or
sponsorship

Más que palabras: Buscando 2020 Asociación por los Research report
consensos para caracterizar el Derechos Civiles
discurso de odio

More than words: Seeking

consensus to characterise hate
speech

https://adc.org.ar/wp-content/
uploads/2020/06/ADC-Informe-
Más-que-palabras-06-2020.pdf

MonitorA: relatório sobre violência 2021 Revista AzMina and Research report
política online em páginas e perfis InternetLab
de candidatas(os) nas eleições
municipais de 2020

MonitorA: Report on online political

violence in female (and male)
candidates’ pages and profiles in
the 2020 municipal elections

https://azmina.com.br/wp-content/
uploads/2021/03/5P_Relatorio_
MonitorA-ENG.pdf

Outras vozes: Gênero, raça, classe e 2019 InternetLab Research report

sexualidade nas eleições de 2018

Other voices: Gender, race, class

and sexuality in the 2018 elections

http://www.internetlab.org.br/
wp-content/uploads/2019/10/
OutrasVozes_2018.pdf
 24

Source / translation Year Institutional Document type

authorship or
sponsorship

Violência contra LGBT+s nos 2019 InternetLab Research report

contextos eleitoral e pós-eleitoral

Violence against LGBT+s in electoral

and post-electoral contexts

http://violencialgbt.com.br/
dados/190321_relatorio_LGBT_
V1.pdf

Visibilidade sapatão nas redes: Entre 2020 Coding Rights Research report
violência e solidariedade

Dyke visibility online: From violence

to solidarity

https://codingrights.org/docs/
visibilidade_sapatao.pdf