Uma análise discursiva de dizeres públicos de mulheres sexualmente violadas: língua e testemunho

Abstract

This research, aligned with materialist Discourse Analysis (Pêcheux, [1969] 1997; 1995; Orlandi, 1987; 2007; 2015), aims to understand how women who have suffered sexual violence publicly signify the violence they have suffered, especially in the Brazilian context. The study mobilizes essential theoretical concepts such as discourse, ideology, subject, conditions of production, ideological and discursive formations, discursive memory, and interdiscourse. From a socio-historical perspective, the research dialogues with studies on symbolic violence and power relations (Bourdieu, 2012; Foucault, 1996), as well as discussions on gender, patriarchy and rape culture (Saffioti, 2015; Gonzales, 1984). The study also problematizes the notion of testimony, the unspeakable (Mariani, 2016; 2021; Vinhas, 2022), understood as a space of meaning in which the real of language and the real of history come into conflict when the subject faces the impossibility of saying everything about violent trauma. The corpus consists of open letters, interviews, and public posts by women widely known in Brazilian media, such as Klara Castanho, Joanna Maranhão and Xuxa, and international media, like Simone Biles. These statements were taken as discursive materialities that allow us to observe the processes of production of meaning about sexual violence in the public and digital media space. Methodologically speaking, this study adopted the analytical gesture proposed by Orlandi (2015), considering the conditions of production of these discourses and their historical-ideological intersections. The analysis seeks to understand how the discourses produced by these women get into conflict with the effects of meaning historically produced by the patriarchy, particularly regarding the social construction of guilt, which is often displaced from the aggressor to the victim. The results indicate that, by positioning themselves discursively in the public sphere, these women produce displacements in historically crystallized meanings about sexual violence. The analytical gesture allowed us to understand that the discursive materialization of violence partially breaks the effects of silencing, mobilizing meanings of resistance, denunciation, resignifying them. The analysis highlights that the production of discourses about sexual violence, when made public, constitutes acts that go beyond denunciation; they are also political acts of resistance, confronting the power relations that structure society. Thus, the research contributes both to the field of discursive studies and to the understanding of the ways in which dominant ideologies produce and maintain meanings about sexual violence against women. This work reaffirms that language is a field of symbolic dispute in which silencing and speaking are placed as opposing but historically determined forces.