The democratic crises and political ruptures marked by the 2016 coup, which polarized the public debate in Brazil, showed us that the notions of family have guided contemporary discussions, especially when tensioned from the advances in the struggles for recognition taken up by the LGBTQIA+ populations and of women, through the feminist gender debate. In different spaces, we were able to witness the mobilization of the concept of traditional, or nuclear, family, as a resource for coping with social changes arising from the visibility of other
relationships and ways of being and living. At the same time, we also see in debate arenas the assertion that, as a historical-social construct, the family entity is mutable and diverse. In this context, we ask ourselves: what arguments are put forward in the public sphere to defend one or another way of dealing with the issue? And how do the media act in this context? These questions instigated this research. Our general objective in this work is to understand how the notions of family guide the contemporary political debate from the tensions arising from the action of social movements and the meanings produced about the family category in the media.
Specifically, we want to a) Identify which senses/notions and arguments about family emerge in different communicational contexts; b) Identify which contemporary landmarks are decisive for the debate on families in the political agenda; c) Understand what notion of politics or democracy underlies discourses about families and what elements/characteristics/aspects of the family entity are in dispute; f) Understand how social movements from different political spectrums (conservatives and progressives) build their political agendas around the family category. For this, we focus on a theoretical framework to understand the elements that led to the rise of the extreme right in western democracies, the convenient partnership between neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christians, especially evangelicals, and the strength of neoliberalism operating as rationality in social relations. In addition, we seek to understand the role of the media in inserting themes for discussion in the public sphere and how social movements appropriate environments of increased visibility to reverberate their agendas. The corpus of analysis consists of texts published on the news portals O Globo and Estadão; and the content of progressive (ABRAFH and Aliança LGBTI+) and conservative (Instituto Plínio Corrêa Oliveira and Movimento de Defesa da Família) sites. To answer our questions, we developed a Content Analysis with technological support from the Iramuteq software, which helped us to systematize the data. For each dimension, we established categories based on the Descending Hierarchical Classification (CHD) derived from the Reinert Method, produced by the software. The categorization allowed us to understand the available arguments about families that deal with the defense of a rigid structure, which contributes to the maintenance of traditionality and an expanded notion of family.
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