THE CONTROL OVER THE FEMININE BODIES:
the formulation/circulation of the discourse on abortion on Instagram
Discourse. Body. Woman. Abortion. Virtual Space.
The current work proposes to understand the functioning of the discourse on abortion in the virtual space, especially on Instagram. In order to comprehend the character of the functioning of this discourse, it was essential to understand the theoretical relationship between discourse, subject and history, proposed by the French perspective of Discourse Analysis (DA), founded by M. Pêcheux and developed here in Brazil by Eni Orlandi and other scholars, which will work as a theoretical-ethodological support for this research. The research corpus is formed by discursive sequences (DS) about abortion that are inscribed in different Discursive Formations (DF), which mobilize meanings of “crime” and “right” in the virtual space. In this sense, we investigate how the antagonistic discourses on abortion make the relations of control exercised by the State, the Church and society over female bodies work. Through the analysis, we understand that the circulation of meanings about abortion in the virtual space (GRIGOLETTO, 2011) cannot be separated from the empirical space, nor from the discursive space, since the virtual is the result of social capitalist formation and, as such, cannot be dissociated from the others. For that reason, we understand that the discourses on abortion that circulate in the virtual space are not neutral, since they are determined by the “complex of ideological formations”, which provide evidence about abortion practices and reflect the contradictions of class, race and genre.