Masculinidades em tempos de desencanto: usos e desusos da história medieval nas redes sociais da internet no Brasil (2018-2022)

Abstract

The handling and recreation of the past is a source of social mobilization by authoritarian governments in different periods of history. In contemporary Brazil, we note a partisan political use of the medieval period and the production of media content that finds some connection with the Middle Ages in national politics. These uses of medieval imagery without any commitment to the historical period, maintain the medieval “aesthetics” to generate political advertisements based on contemporary claims. These applications sustain the same ambivalence that the Middle Ages were portrayed at other times, sometimes being a positive period, sometimes being negative. In this sense, this dissertation is intended to analyze how Medieval History was used as a mobilization impulse in the social networks of groups of the contemporary Brazilian extreme right. To better understand the context of such management of the past, we seek to dedicate ourselves to understanding other contexts of the use of the Middle Ages as a source of social mobilization, to understand the specificities of the use of the medieval past in Brazilian lands. Concerning our research documentary body, we dedicated ourselves to analyzing the imagery, audiovisual and textual sources of groups of the Brazilian contemporary extreme right (2018-2022) linked on the Internet. We are dedicated to demonstrating that the manipulations of the Middle Ages past have specificities in the Brazilian territory thanks to contemporary political and social changes, which culminate in a fertile ground for these productions and we aim to understand how these groups understand the medieval period and medieval men. In this way, we perceive that such uses of history are shown as a way of seeking aspirations for a glorious future in the past, in response to a present in which these men feel they belong to a collective disenchantment.