Gestures of interpretation in the activity of reading the lyrics of the song “Mulheres de Atenas”.

Abstract

This article is an account of a reading activity that addresses women’s identity. Our goal is to analyze the discursivities that make up the students' responses and that produce meanings about the condition of the woman portrayed in the lyrics of the song “Mulheres de Atenas” by Buarque and Boal (1976). When bringing social issues to the classroom context, we take into account the growing importance of struggles for the rights of minority groups, among which the debates on the identity of women stand out. We use the concepts of French Discourse Analysis, such as discursive formation, effects of meaning, interdiscourse and subject, based on authors such as Althusser (1970), Authier-Revuz (2004), Brandão (2004), Pêcheux (1978) e Orlandi (2009), among others. The data was generated by means of a questionnaire applied to a class of 7th grade of regular elementary school, with the help of the Google Forms tool and the WhatsApp mobile device application, between June and July 2019. Gestures of reading the musical composition pointed to the discursive constitution of several subjects, always showing the presence of another, in an interdiscourse that implies a social place and a transient identity constitution, affirming sometimes adolescence, sometimes the adult condition, now the student, now the worker who competes for work in the market. In the words of the respondents to the questionnaire, we identified the perception of violence against women, from subordination to their husbands to the lack of recognition for their work, dehumanization and objectification.