Menino veste azul e menina veste rosa: a ex-ministra Damares Alves e o seu evento polêmico

Abstract

Damares Alves, former Minister of the Ministry of Women, Family, and Human Rights in Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019–2022), made several polemic statements during her tenure. One of these is Boys wear blue, and girls wear pink,which sparked divergent opinions both within and outside digital media. These divergences reflect contemporary political and cultural disputes, which, despite their historical roots, have always been part of society, fostering discourses that have become central in this context. Thus, in the current context, numerous discourses include polemic statements within the realm of Brazilian politics. In this light, focusing on the polemic event surrounding Damares Alves’s statement Boys wear blue, and girls wear pink, we propose an analysis of four videos posted on the YouTube platform by four different channels: Jonathan Nemer (2019); Déia e Tiba (2019); Louie Ponto (2019); and Nunca Te Pedi Nada (2019). One video related to the former minister's statement was selected from each channel to characterize the discursive fields of the polemic event under analysis. Thesevideos were used to analyze the antagonistic discourses, as well as the polemic acts of the arguing subjects, aiming to understand the meanings of their arguments and how these meanings are constructed. Thus, based on the Dialogical Argumentation Analysis framework (Nascimento, 2018a), we examined the relationships between the speaker and the audience, the polemic acts that permeate them, and the notions of polemic in public spaces, polemic events, and polemic acts. This analysis made it possible to expand the debate about polemics in public spaces, particularly in political-social contexts like the one triggered by the polemic event Boys wear blue, and girls wear pink, the central object of this study. Moreover, it allowed for an understanding of this polemic event's trajectory in the current context. The results of this study identified values and provided an understanding of the discursive fields present in the polemic act in question. Additionally, they highlighted how the polemic acts of the arguing subjects influence the migratory nature of the polemic within the analyzed event.