Discursive representations of female work: the hands and marks on Eu empregada domestica
Domestic work in Brazil. Housemaid. Critical discourse analysis. Reports.
In a multidisciplinar dialogue with historical and cultural studies, this research takes a discursive perspective, highlighting the social and linguistic materiality, as well as a constructivist look to society in order to investigate how female domestic workers are represented on the Facebook page called Eu, Empregada doméstica, reporting the way work goes through social life, according to (re)presented comments in a social media page. We propose to question, through the Critical Discourse Analysis, the way the female domestic workers’ reports are constituted on the fanpage Eu, empregada doméstica, created by the ex-domestic worker, teacher and rapper Preta Rara, as well as the identity of those female workers on the page. The problem of discrimination, exploration and (in)visibility of the workers is showed in this discursive study, in which is also used some contribuitions from cultural studies and Sociology so we can reflect about domestic work. Considering the constructivist perspective of society and culture, anchored by the studies of the sociologist Anthony Giddens, this work forsees the speech(es), that comprehend, according to Fairclough (2001), the use of language as a social practice, and points to the way we see the world and (re)signify it. With this in mind, we use the proposed by Fairclough (2001; 2003) and of some main concepts of this work, as the acional, representation and identification to handle the object, and some procedures to the textual analysis are essential to the analysis, without losing sight of the tridimensional proposal from critical discursive analysis with the perspective of the meanings that, highlighting the reports. Therefore, will be analysed the social practices that reflect and reconstruct wider social historical standards presente on the reports, considering that the reports are discursive practices about housemaids. When dealing with the manings, we notice the significant presence of housemaid’s sayings that “speaks” about herself. Sometimes there is the narrative of the other’s story, while a social denoucement to the housemaid’s condition with whom they lived with. We work, therefore, with the implications of these sayings and how they are manifested.