Pânico moral e higienismo verbal: a rede metadiscursiva sobre “linguagem neutra” no Brasil

Abstract

The main goal of this thesis was to identify the place of monolingualism in the metadiscursive regimes built around the public debate about “gender neutral language” in Brazil. To identify this place, this investigation focused on the metadiscursive characteristics of the drafting of Bills against the use of this language in Brazil and also on the paths and trajectories related to these texts, the status of their legal processing and the ongoing public debate starting from them. Throughout a prolonged digital exploration, issues linked to the ideology of standardization, feminist studies and gender studies became part of the critical points for a constructed presentation of the data more suitable for following up this research. Taking these developments into account, the final design of this research assumed the following contour: in the first chapter, the theoretical basis was built from the confluence between the field of language policies, pragmatics, linguistic ideologies and cultural and gender studies. Some categories that cross this epistemic set are the notions of verbal hygiene, social/moral panic, metadiscursive regimes, performative act, and the ideologies of nationalization, monolingualism and normalization. This same chapter also contains the methodological support of the research, which is supported by digital ethnography and entextualization processes, present in the stages of recording empirical material and systematizing data, visual schemes and determining factors for analyzes and conclusions. In the second chapter, I bring a contextualization about language and gender from the 70s to the present day and make a hook to present the public discussion in relation to neutral language in Brazil, and I also arrive at the notion of social/moral panic, which permeates the entire work. In the third chapter, I present in detail the registered empirical material and how it unfolded into a prohibitive and an affirmative facet, in the form of establishing two metadiscursive regimes. In the fourth chapter, I draw my interpretation of the Brazilian public discussion around neutral language based on this architecture composed of two discursive fronts and highlight three points of inflection/reflection that lead me to conclude that neutral language is being invented in Brazil by a thread “monstrous” of entextualizations, which carries some contradictions, articulations and divergences – in which both regimes appear to be performative and hygienist.