Testimonies of violence in gynecology consultations: sexuality, silence, marginality

• Main Author: Aline Fernandes de Azevedo Bocchi
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná 2018-12-01
• Series: Travessias
• Subjects: témoignages de violence; sexualités; silence; marge.
• Online Access: http://e-revista.unioeste.br/index.php/travessias/article/view/21244

The aim of this article is to interrogate the relationship between medical power and normative discourses about sexuality from observations of marginal discourses to heteronormative sexualities. This is a qualitative study aimed at examining language practices in lesbian, bisexual and transsexual testimonies in gynecology consultations. The analysis is carried out considering a corpus comprising reports collected on the Internet. The theoretical approach consists of articulating perspectives from feminist studies to those of discourse analysis, particularly ones developed in Brazil, especially by Michel Pêcheux and Eni Orlandi.  The notion of silence developed by Orlandi articulated to the notion of marginality (hooks, 1990) aims at reflection. The analysis of the corpus of testimonies enables us to see the way in which the universalism of medical discourse produces normalization of the body from pre-constructed stereotypes about sexualities. It is a question of challenging the biological determinism that prevails in medical discourses, emphasizing the construction of gender identities and norms, and considering the possible articulations between power, genres and language. Thus, analysing the testimonies can contribute to "containing the violence of the norms that govern the gender" (Butler, 2005: 43), with respect to the criticism of the biological conception of the body that remains dominant in medicine.