The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Camilla Tavares, whose focus is on the posts of Brazilian congresswomen who spoke out on Instagram about a proposed constitutional amendment that sought to prohibit legal abortion. Brazil has historically had a high level of gender inequality in parliamentary representation; even though it elected a record number of female representatives in the past election, still only 91 of 513 representatives in the federal parliament are female, and a substantial number of them hold highly conservative positions.
A proposed constitutional amendment in 2024 sought to establish a right to life from the point of conception rather than from birth, severely reversing existing rights; the fight over this proposal took place to a considerable extent also on Instagram, and therefore also via multimodal posts. Such posts also showcase congresswomen’s personal and political identities, and appealed to and sought to influence those of their followers. Further, abortion is also positioned in Brazil and elsewhere as part of a broader conservative agenda designed to fragment progressive forces.
Of the 29 congresswomen with more than 100,000 followers, ten posted about the proposal – six from the left and four from the right. The project gathered these posts, and analysed their content; the comments on these posts made by ordinary users were also extracted. Right-wing congresswomen received twice as many comments as those on the right; of these, some 8% on the left and 29% of comments on the right were emoji-only comments, meaning that on balance left-wing congresswomen received more elaborate text-based comments.
Comment texts clustered around religious, legal, and supportive themes. On the left, comments framed women as central to the debate, and highlighted the loss of rights; on the right, the focus was on religion, the rights of the unborn child, and congratulations on the congresswomen’s role in drafting the law. Further research will explore the prevalence of symbolic violence in these comments, and examine hostile discourse from unsympathetic users in such commentary.
