Towards a political sociology of emotions: resentment and conservative social protest in Brazil

Abstract

The article addresses, in terms of a political sociology of emotions, a moral sentiment, namely the resentment
that shaped the conservative social protest that engulfed Brazil in the last decade and culminated in the rise
of the reactionary populism embodied by Bolsonarism. This social protest was especially expressed through
virtual social networks in the form of connective action. The empirical material that supports the analysis
developed was collected using a profile on the social network Twitter from a sample of 1615 tweets that
were collected and categorized using the RQDA qualitative data analysis package from the R programming
language. Finally, the argument developed in the paper reaches two conclusions, namely: a) the resentment
that fuels conservative protest in Brazil is related to fear of the loss of privileges and social distinction by
sectors of the middle classes as a result of the implementation of redistributive policies during the Workers'
Party governments in the Presidency of the Republic (2002-2016); and b) this resentment is associated with
a conservative sociodicy that naturalizes and legitimizes the symbolic reproduction of inequality based on the
categories of class, gender and race.