DISCOURSE AND MEMORY: FEMALE PASTORATE IN THE BRAZILIAN BAPTIST AND THE NATIONAL BAPTIST CONVENTIONS

Abstract

ABSTRACT

In this work, we aimed to analyze the memory effects, and the meaning effects constituted in the/by the relation between the two stances present in the Baptist Protestant context about the legitimacy of female pastorship. Therefore, we considered the stance of the two main Baptist conventions in Brazil, namely, the Convenção Batista Brasileira (Brazilian Baptist Convention) and the Convenção Batista Nacional (National Baptist Convention). Then, to study these two stances, we use as corpus institutional documents, papers published in O Jornal Batista, of the Convenção Batista Brasileira, and excerpts of the debate about the female ordination, promoted by Ordem de Pastores Batistas Nacionais do Distrito Federal (National Baptist Pastors Order of Federal District), affiliated to the Convenção Batista Nacional. The methodology used in this work consists of the analysis of linguistic and textual indications that permit to identify the discursive functioning in the texts analyzed. Form the identification of these indications, we analyzed, initially, the utterances basing on the notion of historic discontinuity, according to Foucault (2002 [1969]; 2008 [1972]). After that, we verified, in the utterances analyzed, how the discursive memory permits the relation between two discursive events about the woman (feminist movement and female pastorship defense), from the theoretical considerations about the functioning of the memory, developed by Pêcheux (2007, 2006), Achard (2007), and Indurski (2011). To comprehend the functioning of the memory in these two events, we analyzed the meaning effects of the words “equality” and “freedom”, as ideas defended in the three phases of the feminist movement, in order to verify how these lexemes are materialized, as memory effect about the present time, in the texts about female pastorship. Finally, basing on Maingueneau (2005; 2010), we discussed the discursive controversy, from the analysis of linguistic elements present at the utterances, which permitted the identification of the three dimensions of controversial discourse defended by the author, namely: the pragmatic-enunciative dimension, the social-generic dimension and the semantic dimension. As results of the analyses, we verified three characteristics about the discursive functioning of the corpus analyzed: i) the discursive processes that involve the legitimacy of woman as pastors happen basing on the relation between the power, ruptures, and historic reconfigurations; ii) the tensions present at the inter-discursive process indicate historic marks of the religious, social, philosophic, even politic field that interpellate the subject, and these marks occurs due to a memory effect about the present time in the discursive event; iii) the discursive memory is also materialized in the controversial discourse through the imbrication of the pragmatic-enunciative, socio-generic and semantic dimensions.