Symbolic violence in the discourse on ‘gender ideology’: a perspective from symbolic domination through moral panic and post-truth

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how, in Mexico, an imaginary about “gender ideology” has been produced and appropriated, through which practices of symbolic violence against women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people (LGBT) are developed. To achieve this objective, we followed a methodological route that goes from digital ethnography to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It is in this context that, initially, we locate the coordinates that paved the way for evangelical politicization and the formation of an interreligious citizenship that opposes “gender ideology”. We then identified a) religious, b) parliamentary, and c) interreligious actors of civil society as pedagogical issuers of an imaginary that challenges “gender ideology” and, through symbolic domination based on regimes of truth in which the legitimacy of the sex-gender order –heteropatriarchal and binary– and the creation of a post-truth –through various processes of disinformation– produce a moral panic that has serious consequences, including the criminalization of reproductive autonomy, the stigmatization of feminist and LGBT social movements –and of the identities that embody them– discrimination, and LGBT-phobia.