Towards a political sociology of emotions: resentment and conservative social protest in Brazil

The article addresses, in terms of a political sociology of emotions, a moral sentiment, namely the resentment that shaped the conservative social protest that engulfed Brazil in the last decade and culminated in the rise of the reactionary populism embodied by Bolsonarism. This social protest was especially expressed through virtual social networks in the form of connective action. The empirical material that supports the analysis developed was collected using a profile on the social network Twitter from a sample of 1615 tweets that were collected and categorized using the RQDA qualitative data analysis package from the R programming language. Finally, the argument developed in the paper reaches two conclusions, namely: a) the resentment that fuels conservative protest in Brazil is related to fear of the loss of privileges and social distinction by sectors of the middle classes as a result of the implementation of redistributive policies during the Workers' Party governments in the Presidency of the Republic (2002-2016); and b) this resentment is associated with a conservative sociodicy that naturalizes and legitimizes the symbolic reproduction of inequality based on the of and race.