Trolling in Brazilian politics: a discursive analysis of humor effects in far right discourse

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how trolling functions in brazilian political discourse, focusing particularly on its uses in the extreme right, during and after the presidential campaigns of 2018 and 2022. Considering its inclusion in a certain threshold between humor and hate speech and its digital circulation, we will seek to identify, describe, categorize and interpret the main properties of trolling, the production of its effects, the materialization of its affections and the possible discursive mutations that it promotes in ways of saying hate speech in the political field. More precisely, we aim to answer the following questions: what are the historical conditions that allow the emergence of trolling in contemporary Brazilian political discourse? How is its construction on the boundaries between the production of humor within a discursive community and the discrimination of those outside it? What is the content of the trolling in the groups and subjects trolled by the extreme right and which affections materialize in their trolling? What are the most recurrent forms and discursive resources of hate speech to circulate disguised under the effects of humor? What are the marks of the present and of memory in the practice of political trolling in contemporary Brazil, in the form of presences, reformulations and erasures of the speeches of others used by the enunciator to reject in his own formulation the prohibition of his utterance that trolls and/or to assert your right to say so? In order to answer these and other questions, we will analyze political memes, speeches and public gestures produced throughout and following the 2018 and 2022 presidential campaigns. To do so, our work will be based on postulates, notions and procedures of the French-line Discourse Analysis, contributions from Michel Foucault's thought on the order of discourse and recent studies on trolling in political discourse. (AU)