On Contrafacta, Transgression, and the New Right in Brazil

Abstract This article examines the New Right’s stagings of transgression during Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign. It takes as an entry point the campaign’s adoption of ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ (Bolsonaro’s Prohibited Funk), a contrafact of the funk hit ‘Baile de Favela’ (Favela Funk Party). The article then situates the song within a constellation of other contrafacta circulating on social media platforms and on the streets of São Paulo to reflect on the New Right’s transgressive performances and controversial claims to facticity. It demonstrates how the New Right deploys this sensibility to signal its alternativity to the liberal ‘mainstream’, a strategy that distances the movement both from neoliberal promises of tolerance and from the aesthetic canon of the traditional right. In a context marked by political corruption, economic crisis, and post-truth politics, this performance of transgression falsely constructs New Right leaders as truth-tellers.