“NEGA BIGA, VÉIA BASTIANA AND MARIA PITÚ”

INFAMOUS LIVES OF STREET WOMEN ON INSTAGRAM

Abstract

This paper discusses the invisibility and discrimination faced by street women in the Bahian city of Jacobina during the 1970s. Their lives were resignified on Instagram, particularly in the group profile @ciasaraudasseis in 2021, through the publication of the text by historian Amanda dos Santos. Since these infamous lives have been recovered by this social network, in specific conditions of existence in the domain of actuality, one can say, through the discursivization of social facts, that such women escaped or were touched by the discourse of power, within everyday micro-relationships, through their most minute practices, since they provoked repudiation for being healers, drunkards, and transgressors of social norms. Our focus is to investigate these infamous narratives from selected utterances on Instagram. To this end, we mainly mobilize the postulates of Foucauldian Discourse Studies, emphasizing the notions of subject, discursive body, enunciate, and infamous lives. In our theoretical scope, we used Foucault (2003) to discuss the lives of these women from the concept of infamy, as well as Jean-Jacques Courtine and Carlos Piovezani (2018) to think about the binomial body and discourse and also Judith Butler (2017), looking at the place of speech that these subjects occupied/occupy in society. We also adopted the archaeological method to highlight how these women of the streets had to raise desperate efforts to stay alive and escape from the place that power determined for them by applying discipline and docilization, but above all, to show the displacement of subjectivities in the narratives of digital space.