Práticas de normalização e enclausuramento: a constituição do sujeito louco em circulação nos discursos das mídias

Abstract

This dissertation aims to discuss the production of the discursive place of madness in circulation in media discourses in times of Psychiatric Reform, questioning the true effect in them. The materiality and corpus of this dissertation are composed of 25 articles taken from various websites which are available on the internet. The interviews contain reports from residents of neighborhoods that received the Psychosocial Care Center (CAPS) and that produce statements which refer to madness and the insane person’s body circulating in the territory. The enunciative series and the reports make up the research archive. The theoretical-methodological perspective used will be composed of concepts from the Foucauldian Discursive Studies, based especially on the writings of this author which deal with madness, the disciplining of bodies, and the production of subjectivity. From the perspective of an archegenealogical reading, the search is for the statements that come from the relationship between history and madness memory which echo today, years later, in the discourse of neighborhood residents that host CAPS. This is what we propose to discuss through the media discourse surrounding madness: its relation of belonging to the history of madness and updated memory to refer to the discursive place of mad subjects. As a result, we realize that the domains of memory, and legal and medical knowledge produce discourses about what madness is and who the mad person is, discourses that focus on the mad person’s body and direct them to the hygienist, police, and segregationist logic. And that despite the temporal breaks presented in the text, the speeches about the confinement and enclosure of the insane are current and legitimized by the government and society itself. Safety devices continue to be activated even in times of post psychiatric reform. The media discourses support the exclusion of the insane person in the territory, that be defended by voices in agreement that do not allow the insane stay in urban spaces and that do not give visibility to what remains obscure.