Between walls and words: the latrine discourse verified in high schools
Latrinary graffiti; Latrinic writing; Representations of gender and sexuality; Discourse Analysis.
The dissertation presented here, Graffiti in men's bathrooms: discourses on representations of gender and sexuality in schools, focuses on the textual productions of a cis-heteronormative nature present in the men's bathrooms of public and reference high schools (EREM) discursive mechanisms that make up the latrine discourse. As a general objective, we set out to identify the means by which gender differences are negotiated and reaffirmed through latrine graffiti, excluding subjects with dissident sexual orientation and, to this end, we make use of the interdisciplinary theories of Cultural Studies, Linguistics, Queer Theories and French Discourse Analysis. As specific objectives, we sought to analyze the discursive mechanisms used by the (re)producers of discourses of sexual violence against homosexuals and women, therefore, we verified the use of normative discourse in the dynamics that provide power and exclusion. Through research, we verified a cultural and disruptive use, in the sense of breaking with the traditional use, of the men's bathroom; such use can perpetuate gender differences, while enabling privacy, through its heterotopia (Foucault, 2013) and its characteristics of “non-place” (Augé, 1999), being subjected by – and subverting – the school, as an ideological apparatus of the state (Althusser, 1985). In this way, gender differences and the exclusion of dissident orientations are made through graffiti and the use of phallocentric and cis-heteronormative discursive contents (Butler, 2018; Foucault, 1988, Moita Lopes, 2002), reproducing male domination (Bourdieau, 2012). Therefore, through discursive analysis (Maingueneau, 1997, 2004, 2008, 2020; Orlandi, 1987, 2001, 2007, 2013; Amossy, 2011, Magalhães and Cavalcante, 2007), we verified the existence of discourses of violence against dissident sexualities, in the order of phallocentrism and cis-heteronormativity, which are characterized by the use of verbal and non-verbal elements, which corroborate and maintain male hegemony, while contributing to violence against LGBTs and women in spaces.