O discurso sobre o trabalho da enfermeira no Brasil: dizeres, silêncios e efeitos de sentido face à formação social capitalista (1932-1987)

Abstract

This study’s main goal is to analyze the discourse on the work of the female nurse in Brazil. It is a qualitative research, anchored on the methodological-theoretical perspective of the Discourse Analysis, begun by Michel Pêcheux. The considered materiality to the constitution of the corpus is the amount of texts/editorials published in the Brazilian Nursing Revue – REBEn, vehicle of the formalized discourse of ideological reproduction of the Brazilian Nursing Association- ABEn, a representative medium of the working class, published between 1932 and 1987. The initial time frame was instituted considering the promulgation of the Decree 94.406 of March 30th 1987, which regulates a new law on the professional exercise of Nursing – Law 7.498 of June 25th, 1986. The ABEn, in its trajectory, used the REBEn, to get in the fight arena disputing over the meaning of the word “nurse” and over the meaning of the “nursing work”. Therefore, in the decades of 1930 and 1940, it recruits sayings to which it mobilizes a discursive memory, causing effects of evidence, meaning to justify the woman leaving the domestic field to enter the work environment. In the decades from 1950 to 1980 it incorporated sayings in order to reach value to the nurse work in Brazil and distance it from a domestic and submissive perspective. We identified two discursive movements by the magazine: the first one, enunciative movement, is characterized by the use of paraphrases and metaphors, retaking references to previously stablished syntagmas, there were neither a migration nor an oscillation of meaning, utilizing sayings that were present in a same discursive setting: the Christian-religious; the second one, movement of the subject-position, was connected to the recruiting of the biomedic discursive setting and the working-class discursive setting. We pointed out that this movement of sayings, silences and meaning effects present in the discourse on the nurse work materialized by the REBEn provided necessary elements to the maintenance of a kind of woman-nurse, key to capitalism’s expanding productive machinery, transmitting the values of the patriarchy ideology that legitimized the dominant interests. Thus, we consider that, although in the whole social praxis there may exist movements of resistance/transformation of a placed reality, in the time frame analyzed by us, the meanings evoked in the enunciates overshadowed the existence of fights marked by contradictions, inequalities and subordination, and contributed to the maintenance of the exploitation-oppression-appropriation of the nurse, that made possible the subordination of the working-woman to the capital promotion.