THE DISCURSIVE FUNCTIONING OF CAMPAIGNS ON VIOLENCE IN BIRTH: TESTIMONY, VIOLENCE AND SILENCE

Abstract

This article reflects on the forms of signifying obstetric violence nowadays, by analysing excerpts from two campaigns fighting this type of violence: #partocomrespeito, produced by and disseminated in the Brazilian weekly magazine Época, and Voces contra la violencia obstétrica, circulated by the Argentine association, Las Casildas. Based on the theoretical precepts of Discourse Analysis developed by Michel Pêcheux and his group, the campaigns in their forms of elaboration and circulation are problematized as producers of different meanings for violence. Woven into the relation among words, images and sounds, they are meanings which are formulated by the interplay between the visible and the invisible. In the excerpts, the embedding of the image and testimony constitutes a discourse about obstetric violence, included in the movement between the speakable and unspeakable of the trauma, between the injunction to say everything and silence in its different versions, as theorized by Orlandi.

Keywords:
Testimony; Image; Obstetric violence; Memory; Silence