Verbal violence at brazilian’s parlament: Discourse analysis of an insult and its politics and legal effects

Abstract

In this work, we analyze the discursive functioning of a case of verbal violence practiced in the Brazilian Congress, that involved deputies Jair Bolsonaro (until then PSL-RJ) and Maria do Rosário Nunes (PT-RS) during the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies that paid homage to the International Human Rights Day, in 2014. The corpus consists of journalistic articles that deal with the event. In the analysis, we mobilized the theoretical-methodological framework of Discourse Analysis, to identify effects of meaning produced in the relationship between political discourse and legal discourse on the practice of verbal violence in the public sphere. The results indicated that, at the intersection of actuality and memory, there is a tension of effects of meaning that structure and restructure verbal violence according to different discursive positions in different social places that produce effects such as the moral damage and breaking of parliamentary decorum, on one hand; and the effect of an outspoken speech, allowed by the exercise of freedom of expression and the use of parliamentary immunity, on the other hand.