Criança brinca, criança não mata : infância e adolescência no discurso parlamentar sobre a maioridade penal

Abstract

This research is mainly aimed at investigating the (re)production of meaning about childhood and adolescence in the parliamentary discourse on lowering the age of penal majority in Brazil. For this, it is based on the theoretical framework of Materialist Discourse Analysis, inaugurated by the studies of Michel Pêcheux, in the late 1960s. Initially, 140 parliamentary pronouncements made during the first-round voting of PEC 171/1993, on June 30, 2015, were taken as a corpus. Throughout the analysis, however, other materialities were included, as a way to better understand how the politics of meaning is established in the discursive memory. In this movement, a certain functioning of hate speech, recurrent in our corpus, mobilized an unfolding in our research question. It is also sought, therefore, to investigate the functioning possibilities of this hate speech associated with exclusion, segregation, dehumanization and extermination in its encounter with an institutionalized political discourse, such as the parliamentary discourse. Thus, this study involved a look at both the socio-historical construction of the child and youth imaginary as an idealized model of childhood/adolescence and the construction and reproduction of the imaginary of the "menor" as a deviant childhood/adolescence, marked by the sliding between poverty → crime