Formações imaginárias e identidade: uma análise dos discursos jornalísticos sobre as quebradeiras de coco babaçu do Maranhão

Abstract

The communities of the Babaçu Coconut Breakers are part of a social group that has historically been the target of prejudice and marginalization. This research therefore starts from the understanding that the media plays a fundamental role in the construction and propagation of images about these communities, often reinforcing romanticized, victimized, and caricatured images that do not correspond to the way these women self-constitute and position themselves in their reality. We thus seek to answer the following question: How do journalistic discourses contribute to the construction (or deconstruction) of the collective identities of the babaçu coconut breakers of Maranhão? To this end, this work aims, in general, to analyze how journalistic discourses construct imaginary formations about the babaçu coconut breakers of Maranhão, producing effects of meaning in the constitution of their collective identities in light of French-oriented Discourse Analysis. More specifically: To identify the ideological and discursive formations that permeate journalistic texts about babaçu coconut breakers, based on linguistic and enunciative markers present in the analyzed reports; To verify the presence of silencing, erasure, and selective visibility of the coconut breakers’ voices in journalistic texts; and To investigate the effects of meaning produced by journalistic discourses in the construction of the collective identity of babaçu coconut breakers. Methodologically, this is a bibliographic research, of a qualitative, interpretative, and analytical nature, whose corpus is composed of three digital reports published in different media outlets in Maranhão, which address the coconut breakers in institutional, cultural, and territorial conflict contexts. For the composition of the theoretical framework, we drew upon the studies of Michel Pêcheux (2014), Eni Orlandi (2007; 2012), and Michel Foucault (2014), mobilizing concepts such as discursive formation, ideological formation, imaginary formations, subject-position, and effects of meaning. The results show that journalistic discourse plays na ambiguous role in the construction of the collective identity of the babaçu coconut breakers; while it provides visibility and recognition, it also limits the complexity of their experiences and struggles