“Face of a maid”: Discourses on the bodies of black women in Brazil
This paper analyses the discursive construction of stereotypes of black women in Brazil, focusing on the discrimination of the domestic worker. Based on the theory of Discourse Analysis, proposed by Michel Pêcheux (1975; 1983), in dialogue with the theoretical production of black feminist Lélia Gonz...
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| Formato: | article |
| Lenguaje: | español |
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2025
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| Acceso en línea: | https://revistas.ort.edu.uy/inmediaciones-de-la-comunicacion/article/view/4110 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11968/7711 |
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| Sumario: | This paper analyses the discursive construction of stereotypes of black women in Brazil, focusing on the discrimination of the domestic worker. Based on the theory of Discourse Analysis, proposed by Michel Pêcheux (1975; 1983), in dialogue with the theoretical production of black feminist Lélia Gonzalez (1983), it is analysed a corpus composed of texts published in the Brazilian media around two controversies with significant repercussion in 2013: the approval of the bill EMC 72-2013, nicknamed "PEC of domestic workers", a project that extended to domestic workers rights already guaranteed to other formal workers in the country, and the federal program "More Doctors", which aims to hire doctors to work in cities with a shortage of basic health services. The statement that provokes the analysis was posted on social networks by a journalist about the "More Doctors" program: "Forgive me if it's prejudice, but these Cuban doctors have the face of a maid. Are they really doctors?" We describe how the meanings for the designation "maid's face" are historically constructed, going through networks of memories in which the bodies of black women are signified (and disputed in their meanings) in the discourses of slavery and colonialism, of the construction of national identity based on the myth of racial democracy and of contemporary social movements of black women. Considering that the ideological struggle also takes place in the field of language, disputing the signifiers and producing regimes of visibility, we also analyse the displacements and equivocal meanings that affect this designation in the current conditions of production and circulation of social discourses about "maids" in the Brazilian public and political space. |
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