Imaginary Universality and Fantasized Rights

A Discursive Analysis of Isidório’s Speech in the Chamber Committee on Same-Sex Unions

Abstract

This article analyzes the speech of federal congressman Pastor Sargento Isidório during the legislative process of Bill 5167/2009, which proposes to prevent the legal equivalence between same-sex unions and heterosexual civil marriage. Drawing on the theoretical-methodological framework of materialist Discourse Analysis, the study examines the conditions of production of his statements, the functioning of the author-function, and the discursive regularities that shape his formulations. The analysis identifies that the author-subject Isidório anchors himself in designations such as “pastor”, “sergeant”, and “madman”, which confer authority and authenticity upon him, crystallized in the form of imaginary coherence. It is also observed that his speech is structured around the reiteration of universality formulas (“everybody knows”), producing an effect of neutrality and impartiality. On the thematic level, two central axes stand out: the biologizing-religious naturalization of sex/gender and the opposition between Law and Fantasy. By simultaneously mobilizing biological-scientific and religious discourses, Isidório naturalizes an essentialist conception of sex/gender, erasing the historicity and heterogeneity of meanings and reducing sexual and gender dissidences to the condition of “fantasy”. This opposition reinforces a logic in which Life (as divine gift and biological process) is treated as universal truth, while Law appears merely as a precarious concession to exceptions. The analysis thus demonstrates that the congressman's discourse, far from being neutral, updates strategies of exclusion and hierarchization of bodies and subjectivities, revealing how discursive disputes in the political arena operate to delimit who can or cannot be recognized as a subject of rights.