Garbage, slut, whore, tramp, and crazy

effects of meaning and discursive determinations in reports of women who were victims of domestic violence

Abstract

This article, based on the theoretical-analytical proposal of the Materialist Discourse Analysis, presents a reflection on domestic violence from testimonies of women who have suffered this violence. The reports were published by the Filhas de Frida collective through the Ajude Aquela campaign, which aimed to raised awareness of the effects of violence against women in the domestic sphere. The description and the interpretation of the corpus, composed of three discursive sequences cut from the reports, was anchored in the analysis of adjectives used to refer to women by their partners, with the discursive process being analyzed through the bias of discursive determinations. With the study, it is possible to conclude that ideology works by producing evidence about what it is to be a woman, making it remain a semantically stabilized universe on female behavior that meets the dominant logic of exploitation and oppression between genders.