Grotesque Representations of Former President Jair Bolsonaro: Semiodiscoursive Issues

Abstract

This article investigates the aesthetics of the grotesque used in images of former President Jair Bolsonaro published in Facebook groups, from the semiodiscursive/tensive approach, demonstrating the pertinence of these points of view for the expansion of comprehension of this aesthetic as a semi-social and semi-discursive practice. From the generative course of meaning and the tensive mode/style of the text, we demonstrate that the grotesque, can be considered a genre/style modalized and stylized in narrative structures and a tensive rhetoric. The texts analyzed are generated by phoric/thymic thematic and figurative paths typical of the genre, mythologically related to the fundamental semantic values life/death and nature/culture, being articulated in tensive syntactic modes and styles, and used not only as social criticism, but the establishment of a semantic program which attempts to disrupt the current one.