GESTAR E PARIR: DESLOCAMENTOS SOBRE O CORPO, MIDIATIZAÇÃO E OS LETRAMENTOS

Abstract

To think about Brazilian society in the present day through the lenses of a woman, (born in the 2000s, a mother, wife, public health worker within the SUS system, etcetera) teacher, and student of Languages and Linguistics - is, at times, equivalent to reflecting on the ubiquity of digital media (Han, 2014; Faustino & Lippold, 2023), the spectacularization of life (Moraes, 2006; Gregolin, 2003), and the (un)success of capitalism/modernity (Mignolo, 2008; Quijano, 2005). These thematics, when studied in the scope of pregnancy and childbirth, have led me to this research, through which I seek to problematize how our bodies are/can be affected by the discourse of a mediatized society and by colonial traces - both of which emerge from/reproduce a neoliberal logic - and the strength of the literacies in the deconstruction of stated truths. In this regard, I pursue the aspiration of a transdisciplinary (Japiassu, 2016), undisciplinary, and transgressive research approach (Moita Lopes, 2006; Pennycook & Makoni, 2020), drawing on a theoretical framework that spans Anthropology (Koury, 2016) and Linguistics (Duboc, 2014; Souza, 2011; Ono, 2018), as well as Philosophy and Sociology (Foucault, 1977; Palermo, 2019), medical literature (Camacho, 2010; Scheifer, 2013), and official laws and policy documents. The dissertation has the following specific objectives: 1. to verify how the discourse of the media and bloggers constructs a "will to truth" about pregnancy and childbirth, associating them with consumption, luxury, and medicalization; 2. to analyze how the universalization of euroeuacentric medical knowledge and capitalist logic transform the female body into a "machine" and childbirth into a "production line," marginalizing ancestral and physiological knowledge; and 3. to bring visibility to the issues involving pregnant and parturient women.Through this, I aim to propose shifts through critical reading, resistance, and the reclaiming of power over the birthing body, toward a de(s)colonial movement of childbirth. This research follows an interpretivist perspective (Moita Lopes, 1994), employing a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology (Bicudo, 2018; Melo, 2016) with autoethnographic nuances (Ono, 2018; 2025), considering that both the observed phenomenon and the factors influencing the construction of meaning are subjective and perspectival. The corpus, composed mainly of images taken from the social media of female bloggers, is presented and analyzed throughout chapters 2 and 3. The analysis of the corpus results in discussions and reflections that particularly concern the body, mediatization, and the spectacularization of life, while moving toward the appreciation of literacies theories and the paving of alternative presents and futures grounded in experience, privacy, and critical awareness. Keywords: Pregnancy and childbirth; mediatization; spectacularization; literacies; experience.