Meaning displacements of the word “woman” in public policies on domestic violence

Abstract

In this paper, based on the theoretical and methodological framework of materialist Discourse Analysis, we aimed to analyze the guideline “Mulher, vire a página…”, published by São Paulo State Prosecutor’s Office, in 2016. Through the emergence of public policies on domestic violence in our society, it is relevant to study how these public policies produces meanings about gender-based violence and how they reveal a performance mode of social codes. Our analysis dwell on meaning displacements of the word “woman”, which sometimes functions as addressing and sometimes as object of discourse; furthermore, we mobilize the concepts of conditions of discourse production (ORLANDI, 2010) to reflect on how former formulations about domestic violence are taken up in the discourse, and imaginary formation, as proposed by Pêcheux (1997a), to think about the representation of the social place of women in the guideline, based on our understanding of gender as inscribed in the movement of imaginary formation and in the balance of power materialized in language. We comprehend that this balance of power is constantly moving in the engine of history, so that we observed meaning displacements of historically stabilized senses about women and domestic violence.