With support from psychoanalysis or philosophy, IEL research group gives a chance to marginalized people
Mental health patients, homeless people or teenagers in conflict with the law do have something (or a lot) to say to ordinary, common, normal society. Yes, they have a lot to say about the society. But, among the people considered “normal”, who is willing to listen? Or even, who is willing to give up space, give permission or leave the way clear so they can talk? This is more or less the concern of the research group “Infamous Voices: exclusion and resistance”, which has existed for around a decade, based at Unicamp. The group is coordinated by professor Maria José Rodrigues Faria Coracini, from the Institute of Language Studies (IEL), and brings together almost twenty researchers from different locations. Studying language, with the support of psychoanalysis or philosophy, is the focus of “Vozes Infames”.
“The name 'Infamous Voices' comes from a text by Michel Foucault: The Lives of Infamous Men. Infamous are also those who have no fame”, says the teacher. Coracini is the advisor of several theses in the group and also carries out research work with homeless women, because in recent years gender issues have occupied a prominent place in the studies carried out by the group. The teacher seeks to listen to women who live on the streets and/or are sheltered. She recently made visits to the Santa Clara Support House Association, linked to Cáritas Arquidiocesana de Campinas.
One of her master's students, Fabiana Anjos, dedicated herself to psychiatric patients treated at a Psychosocial Care Center (Caps) unit in the State of São Paulo. She talked to five people. The conversations were recorded and later transcribed. Fabiana asked few questions, some questions about the participant's life story, what he thought about being treated at Caps, whether he felt different from other people. From then on, the researcher dedicated herself to analyzing “in linguistic materiality”, that is, in the transcription of the speech they produce, ways “in which they tell society about themselves”.
Slips of language, repetitions, traces of forgetfulness or emphases did not escape analysis. “I looked for, among five patients, what, within their language, could be considered a guiding thread, or the organizers of their speech”. For example, when a patient keeps returning to one point in their story. “Some go back to the books they read, others go back to the physical symptoms, this constitutes an organizer of the patient's words”.
The researcher assumes that CAPS simultaneously includes, being a product of psychiatric reform, and can also exclude, therefore, those who attend, or who go to that space, are commonly labeled. “And they don’t see themselves that way. They tell us: 'I'm a schizophrenic who doesn't threaten anyone, I treat people well, I take my medicine properly', they want to get away from that stigma”, explains Fabiana.
The researcher imagined finding regularities in the statements of the five patients, but was surprised. “We found more traces of individualization of the subjects than of proximities”, she states. And individuality is fertile ground. A Nisei patient who worked for years in Japan, but who seems to have been forced to return to Brazil, gives several versions of what happened, and all of them, according to the researcher's reading, refer to a feeling of rejection and exclusion of the world to which he belonged. “As he is the son of a Japanese, it is not only exclusion from the country, but also from his Japanese identity.”
The “tracking” of these marks in the patient’s speech showed Fabiana the return to the subject at every moment of the interview. “There is a paragraph in the transcript in which the patient repeats the word four times travel as a way of reliving the past by telling me his story. He is choosing information to tell me about his life, so that he can make himself known.”
Also a researcher at the Vozes Infames group, master Giulia Gambassi heard reports from former inmates of institutions for minors in conflict with the law. The dissertation deals with the silence that permeates women's life stories. But, first of all, Giulia challenges the term “giving voice” to women in her work. “It’s not about giving a voice, but about giving time, a space for listening, our place of privilege in society”, she adds.
The researcher listened to three women. Two young women were given fictitious names and a third wanted to keep her name, Andréia MF. Giulia realized the power of common sense when the three interviewees made a point of contradicting the relationships between misdemeanor and studies, work or childhood. “One of them told me that she was doing very well at school and I hadn't asked anything. She said this probably because she is used to hearing that those who don't do well in school go to jail, in the same way that they are used to hearing that those who didn't have a normal childhood can commit crimes. They then wanted to highlight that they had a normal childhood.”
For all three, the fact of being a woman influenced all aspects analyzed by the researcher: the mark of the other in their words, the issue of blackness, racism and education and the relationship between the feminine and the discredit of society. “The research addresses how silencing is marked in the speech of these women who, in their identity representations, they sometimes (re)produce and sometimes exceed or extrapolate discursive formations that silence and impose truths on the groups of which they are part”, he observed.
