“Gender ideology” in recent Brazilian academic production

Abstract

The objective of this article is to develop a state of the art of Brazilian academic production on the expression “gender ideology”. With the contributions of Kuhar and Patternotte (2017), Miskolci (2017), Junqueira (2018), Corrêa (2018) and Machado (2018) we present a history of the term, from when it was coined in documents of the Catholic Church until it became a category triggered by transnational anti-gender movements. The research is based on the content analysis of the abstracts of a total of 56 articles published in Brazilian peer-reviewed journals. The corpus’ analysis and categorization was carried out with the help of the Iramuteq software. It was observed that most academic publications converge with the period in which the topic had greater visibility in the public space, in 2018, being concentrated around disputes over educational policies, such as the national and municipal education plans and the Escola Sem Partido project. There are works with the objective of tracing genealogies of organized anti-gender activism based on the phrase “gender ideology”, others relate influences and convergences of Christian activism with anti-gender activism. The research also showed that there are no comparative articles, an important gap, given the transnational character of anti-gender movements.