“Deus me livre ter mais filhos”: a construção do sentido de violência obstétrica a partir dos discursos de mulheres e de médicas(os) obstetras

Abstract

The present work intends to verify how obstetric violence is signified in women’s and obstetricians’ speech according to the process of syntagmatization and semantization of speech, in which the elements of speech are engendered to produce the intended meaning around the expression of obstetric violence. When writing about their experiences, women built an image of themselves, the “I”, and an image of “you”, in an intersubjective relation “thus the situation inherent in the practice of language, namely that of exchange and dialogue, confers a double function on the act of discourse; for the speaker, it represents reality, for the hearer, it recreates that reality” (BENVENISTE, 1976, p. 26). And it is in this relationship between men and its nature and other men through language, that society is established. (Ibid., 1976). Language is performed within a language, and through it “man assimilates culture, spreads and transforms it” (Ibid., p. 32); it is this transformation of culture that women’s speech seeks when they dare to promote the existence of an underestimated reality, of obstetric violence. So this work could be done, the comments of five women that witnessed the experience of obstetric violence in pre-labor and labor were analyzed; these reports were published on a Facebook page, entitled Obstetric Violence. In order to deepen the analysis and discussions derived from the selected comments, there will be used five fragments of interviews carried out with obstetricians in which the topic in question was addressed. Those fragments are available in the doctoral thesis by the title O sensível e o insensível na sala de parto: interdiscursos de profissionais de saúde e mulheres, by Virgínia Junqueira Oliveira. In this collation, it will be possible to realize how two groups bring meaning to obstetric violence through a linguistics analysis, based on the theoretical discussion of Émile Benveniste in PLG I (1976) and PLG II (1989), with the support of Dany-Robert Dufour (2000), regarding intersubjectivity, subjectivity, and three verbal people: “I-you/he”, that go through the established relationships between form and meaning, the semantic domain and the semiotic domain. It was observed that obstetric violence is signified in different ways by women and both male and female doctors, and given that, there is a great difference among their discourses. The discourses of women evoke the feeling of fear, horror, impunity, and inhumanity in the treatment given to the pregnant woman during labor. In the discourses of the doctors, there is an attempt to deny there is any obstetric violence in their work routine and there is an attempt of creating an image of unprepared and unbalanced women that do not obey medical decisions.