Nordestino é... Análises das discursivizações sobre os nordestinos nas redes sociais digitais

Abstract

This thesis studies some discourses on Brazilian northeasterners posted on social network Twitter. The historical section is the 2010, 2014 and 2018 presidential elections in Brazil. Based on Discourse Analysis (DA) developed by Michel Pêcheux this study aimed to analyze the sense effects in the discourses that (re)produce evidences about Brazilian Northeast and northeasterners. The corpus is formed by posts published on Twitter in October of the aforementioned years. In order to achieve this purpose, some categories of DA were approached such as conditions of production, imaginary formations, discursive formation, ideological formation and interdiscourse, as well as theories and analysis from History, Sociology, Philosophy and Linguistics. The results showed that the hate speech, prejudice and xenofobia against northeasterners have been structural in Brazil, and they work to dehumanize those who show resistance in the class struggle. Such discourses run through several institutional, journalistic, media and familiar spaces. They multiply in a viral way on digital social network, and create ideological “justifications” to violate the northeasterners’ rights. It impacts on the senses and practices of democracy and citizenship in Brazilian society. Moreover, the denial/exclusion of the northeasterners does not come from geographic aspects, neither the hate expressed against this group comes from election results, but it comes from class antagonism, whose struggle is a political and economic struggle as a last resort. Hence it concludes that the hate speech against northeasterners expressed on Twitter is not limited to some words or images used in elections periods, because its oppressive-ideological functioning aims to intimidate northeasterners, prevent their political participation, devalue their existence and neutralize their resistance.