WE CAN DO IT!: DISCOURSES ABOUT WOMEN’S STRENGHT IN THE MOVEMENTS OF HISTORY

Abstract

This article analyzes the discourses produced by the famous yellow background poster with the image of a working woman and the title We can do it!. Created in the World War II and repeated by the feminisms in the 1980s and 2010s, the poster produces discourses that relate to different historical conjunctures. We propose an analysis of discourses about the women’s strenght, materialized by the verb-visual utterances, in order to understand how historical conditions of possibility motivate the enunciation of women’s capacity at different times. Affiliated to the Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, a field that investigates the discursive practices and the formation of objects and subjectivities, this work mobilizes the concepts of utterance, archive, and event. The analysis demonstrates that the image’s conditions of return modify the formation rules of theses discourses. Therefore, historical discontinuities determine the repetitions of this utterance as unique and singular events.

Key-words:
Discourse; Utterance; Event; Woman; Feminism