Memória e patrimônio industrial : o testemunho de operárias sobre o trabalho na fábrica pelotense Laneira nas décadas 1960 a 1990

Abstract

Sensing the silence that surrounds the discourses about women workers and industrial heritage, following the theoretical and methodological principles of Discourse Analysis (DA) of the materialist strand, the present work is focused on investigating how the testimonies of female workers contribute to the legitimation of the factory building as industrial heritage. The archive of this research consists of interviews with women who worked at Fábrica Laneira Brasileira Sociedade Anônima in the period between 1960 and 1997. In our corpus, we searched for statements that resume knowledge about the work practices carried out by women in the factory space as well as about the social relations waged in the factory space. For analysis purposes, we configured the discursive formation of female workers, which we understand, from the interpretative gesture that guided this research, to reproduce the knowledge of the dominant ideology, without, however, functioning as a homogeneous space. Thus, the subjects identified with this discursive formation occupy different subject-positions, producing statements that identify and counter-identify with the discursive formation female workers. In our analysis, the discursive memory permeates the testimonies, updating, regularizing, and deregulating the meanings about the factory at the time of enunciation, creating, with this functioning, effects of meaning that, affected by the conditions of production, mean sometimes enjoying the work in the factory environment, and other times perceiving the work in the factory as heavy and difficult, tensioning the discursive formation. The testimonies that legitimize the factory as a place of memory encounter the barrier of the abandonment of the building, which, without destined use, marks the urban fabric as a ruin, silencing the knowledge that constitutes the importance of the space, no longer as a place of work, but as a place of memory. Therefore, it is necessary to designate a new use for the abandoned Laneira building, so that the knowledge about the past, investigated in this research, would be updated in the discourses of Pelotas society, highlighting its historical and cultural value.