WP228 The semiotic politics of affect in the Brazilian political crisis

This paper investigates the geopolitical dynamics of hate and hope during the 2016 impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff, the first female president of Brazil. To do so, it engages with recent theoretical and analytical developments in the fields of linguistic landscapes (i.e. the view of public signage as performatively constitutive of certain understandings of place and its relation with people and vice-versa), citizenship studies (i.e. the recognition that citizenship is not simply a quasi-abstract legal status but involves situated social, political and symbolic acts though which individuals are locally made into citizens), and queer studies (i.e. the analytical tenet of attending to the role of affect in people?s construction of themselves as political beings). The analysis of an archive of images from demonstrations for and against Ms. Rousseff?s demotion unpacks the semiotic politics of affect during the impeachment process and points to the reconfiguration of political and affective regimes in contemporary Brazil. In this scenario, I argue that attending to public signage in times of political turmoil offers an analytical avenue to unearth how individuals semiotically disrupt oppressive social orders by reclaiming place, reimagining selves and others, reconfiguring the present, and redesigning futures.