Wearing the Nation: Football, Populism, and the Rise of Wearable Political Technologies in Brazil

Abstract

This article examines how Brazil’s national football jersey (amarelinha) became a central site of political performance and symbolic contestation during the Bolsonaro period. It advances the concept of political behavior technology to explain this transformation, arguing that the politicisation of the jersey did not result from a simple intrusion of politics into sport, but from the interaction between embodied leadership performance, street mobilisation, platform-based circulation, and affective economies that attached moral meaning to national visibility. Rather than merely representing nationalism, the jersey actively structured political practice by making belonging wearable, repeatable, and publicly recognisable. Methodologically, the study combines genealogical reconstruction, visual-performative analysis, and media-ecological interpretation of key mobilisation dynamics between 2018 and 2022. While celebrity mediation, particularly Neymar’s symbolic visibility, contributed to the amplification of politicised meanings, the article rejects single-actor explanations and conceptualises symbolic transformation as the outcome of a broader ecology of mediated performances. The analysis advances a critical-normative argument: although symbolic capture is always contingent, the temporary monopolisation of national imagery by exclusionary political projects constitutes a democratic pathology because it restricts access to the symbolic commons and reshapes conditions of public recognition. By linking populist aesthetics to material infrastructures of visibility, the article contributes to Latin American political sociology and cultural studies by showing how everyday cultural artefacts become both instruments of symbolic power and arenas of democratic contestation.