“It’s a Matter of Working or Dying of Hunger”: Neoliberalism, Pandemic, and Violence on Twitter

This article aims to problematize discourses about the lockdown engendered on Twitter by public political figures. Based on Pecheut’s Discourse Analysis and on Foucault’s and Mbembe’s considerations on biopower and necropolitics, we seek in the corpus enunciative regularities (un)veiled in the metap...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Brito, Cristiane Carvalho de Paula, França, Thyago Madeira, Ângelo, Rogério de Castro
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2023
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU)
Repository:Letras & letras (Online)
Language:Portuguese
OAI Identifier:oai:ojs.www.seer.ufu.br:article/67914
Online Access:https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/letraseletras/article/view/67914
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Pandemia
Discurso
Redes sociais
Lockdown
Necropolítica
Pandemic
Discourse
Social networks
Necropolitics
Description
Summary:This article aims to problematize discourses about the lockdown engendered on Twitter by public political figures. Based on Pecheut’s Discourse Analysis and on Foucault’s and Mbembe’s considerations on biopower and necropolitics, we seek in the corpus enunciative regularities (un)veiled in the metaphorical effects produced in the confront between the thread of the discourse and interdiscourse. In our analyses, we outline three predominant discourses, namely: the rivalry discourse, the helplessness discourse, and the religious discourse, which are constituted by a neoliberal interdiscursivity, which, in turn, serves to hold the State less responsible for the ills faced by citizens and to corroborate the suffering of those who are part of the “global south”.