“Vítima surda-muda e analfabeta”: uma análise crítica do direito linguístico e da representação de mulheres surdas em acórdãos judiciais

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze, from the relationship between Law and Language, how linguistic law and deaf women are represented in texts of judicial decisions. More specifically, we seek to reveal how the legal discourse is forged by power relations and ideologies; extract from selected texts (legal rulings) ideological conceptions that mark the address on linguistic law and on the deaf woman, shedding light on the naturalization of deafness as incapacitating and of the deaf as disabled and limited. For this purpose, we use the theoretical-methodological apparatus of Critical Discourse Analysis, CDA, as proposed by Fairclough (2001, 2003) and Van Leeuwen (1997), among others. The corpus of analysis consists of documentary data, based on court judgments, available to the public and collected on legalwebsites on the internet, whose categories chosen for analysis are the lexicalization and meaning of the words presented by Fairclough (2001) and the Representation of Social Actors proposed by Van Leeuwen (2008). In this analysis, the use of linguistic instruments exposed ableist representations about the deaf woman victim of violence, imputing a need to somehow awaken the acute sense of legal professionals about the effects of the use of language in the process of social transformation, so that have a close look not only at norms and doctrines but also at the ideological and political marks that sustain hegemonic speeches.