Constitution and (re)formulation of meanings: a women in speeches about AIDS prevention

Résumé

In this paper, I analyze some specific speeches conveyed in two advertisements of the Health Department (one of them from 2000 and another from 2019), during the Campaign for Prevention against AIDS. Important theoretical notions of Discourse Analysis (DA) of a Pecheutian approach are mobilized, such as discursive memory, interdiscourse, discursive formations and ideological formations that together allow us to understand imaginary processes of recognition/ignorance that constitute the subjects in their social relations. Such discourses conveyed at different times, distanced within a space of nineteen years, provide us, through the analysis, not only to mobilize the theoretical assumptions of AD, but, also, to pay attention to the imperative need to disentangle ourselves from this tenuous frontier that we seek delimit/determine what belongs to women and men in society. This leads us to consider what Orlandi (2001, p. 144) states about power relations being symbolized in power relations present in the game of meanings. Then, the desire for clarity (certainty) enters the scene: it is part of the rhetorical staging of power to advocate clarity, transparency, thus practicing the erasure, the silencing of other possible senses. There is no uniqueness of meanings because of history, politics, subjects. In this regard, the clear meaning is the one that stabilizes, the dominant meaning. Power is always surrounding the meanings it produces with a large amount of discourses, which would have the purpose of explaining them, disambiguating them, to give us the certainty of (its) (true) meaning.