Gender and riverine memory on stage

discursive readings of a short documentary in the Tocantins Amazon

Abstract

This article analyzes the verbal materiality of the documentary Festival do Camarão de Itaperuçu (2017) through French Discourse Analysis (Orlandi, 2015; Pêcheux, 1997), in order to understand to what extent this audiovisual piece operates as a device for the work of memory, history, and identity of a riverine community and how, within this process, women’s roles are inscribed or regulated. A qualitative, discourse-based approach was adopted, using a single corpus (full transcript of the documentary), segmented into dense sequences and interpreted through the notions of production conditions, discursive memory, discursive formation, and constitutive silence. Findings show that the documentary, while archiving the already-said about the festival’s origin and expansion, manages voices so as to keep interpretive authority in male positions and to introduce female participation mainly through a deferential and collaborative lexicon. It is concluded that the film strengthens the community’s public inscription as a cultural subject, yet it also reveals gender asymmetries that should be further problematized.