Reclaiming presence

Abstract

Political actors’ embedding of the here-and-now of enunciation into constructions of gender, sexuality and race is a deictic practice that can be uncoupled from its context and projected into political fields. This article unpacks alternative invocations of the deictic field by Jair Bolsonaro’s new right in Brazil and by Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman who was assassinated in 2018, the same year Bolsonaro was elected president. While Bolsonaro has vilified progressive tropes, such as gender equality, sex positive education and Marielle’s legacy, Marielle and later her mourning movement have mapped her here-and-now onto mottos such as ‘Marielle lives’, which defy chronologic time. Marielle’s central figure has thus been ‘present’ across the political spectrum – for progressives as a figure of immanence, and for white supremacists as a symbol of the Black gendered body whose life is not mournable but whose phantasmatic presence is a continuing threat.