Mulheres e trabalho reprodutivo: um olhar discursivo para os efeitos da pandemia nas relações generificadas

Abstract

In this research, we aim to analyze the statements of Brazilian women about their living conditions during the pandemic, reflecting on the effects of the health crisis on their relationship with reproductive labor. To this end, we propose a theoretical articulation between Materialist Discourse Analysis (MDA) and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). Among feminist theories, we justify the choice of SRT as the theoretical framework because it enables us to consider the process of gendering subjects as a central element in the organization of material life, examining how gender operates within the dynamics of production and reproduction in the neoliberal capitalist mode of production. In this context, gender is understood through the lens of social reproduction labor, in association with race and class identifications, articulated via the Althusserian concept of overdetermination. We observe race and gender identifications, along with class positions, as constitutive elements of the ideological interpellation process that produces the evidences to which the subject is subjected, enabling the subject to function on its own (Pêcheux, 1997), self-regulating in favor of the State and reproducing dominant meanings. These identifications keep women bound to reproductive labor, producing subjectivities aligned with the dominant ideology that shapes our neoliberal social formation. Although reproductive labor extends beyond unpaid domestic and caregiving work performed by women in their homes, in this text we focus on this specific aspect due to the materiality under analysis. Our analytical gesture was conducted using as a corpus a podcast episode released on April 14, 2021, and a satirical song released on March 23, 2021, through which we reflected on the effects of reproductive labor on women's subjectivation processes. The analysis was constructed based on regularities identified in the material—both written and inscribed—emphasizing the recurrence of meanings associated with exhaustion and fatigue. From this, we were able to reflect on labor, subjectivity, isolation, and home. In this process, the enunciative position, as a dimension of subject-positions, proved fundamental in the production of meaning, revealing how relations of oppression and exploitation determine differences in meaning, silencing or making visible the oppressions and exploitations that sustain the reproduction of production relations in neoliberalism. We also identified possibilities for resistance, where the bad-subject takes the floor. In the analyzed corpus, resistance was understood through excess and repetition of words or structures. We interpret this repetition as the return of the real of language, emerging in the face of lack, incompleteness, and the impossibility of fully signifying the effects of intensified oppression and exploitation during physical isolation. We consider the pandemic as a discursive event, as it disrupts sense affiliations and production relations. As evidence of this event, we highlight the emergence of new formulations—such as "the new normal"—the ambiguity surrounding terms like "social isolation," and the construction of a pre-constructed notion around the term "mothers."