"Quem mandou matar?"

argumentation, serial textuality and victimary dispositif in the confrontation between hashtags

Abstract

This work seeks to reflect on the question "Quem mandou matar Marielle?" from the notion of Victimary Dispositif (Giglioli, 2016). Thus, it is important to say that, considering the disputes surrounding the death of councilwoman Marielle Franco, this question works as a gesture of denunciation that is constantly delegitimized. One of the forms of delegitimization is the circulation of paraphrastic answers such as "Quem mandou matar Sérgio Moro?" or "Quem mandou matar Bolsonaro?", that is, questions that produce a displacement in relation to the victimized political figure. There is, therefore, a repetition of the structure of the question ("Quem mandou matar?") and a variation of the victim's name (from Marielle to Sérgio Moro/Bolsonaro), which allows us to understand this statement as a serial textuality (Dias, 2019), that is, textuality formed by a common and stable trait and, at the same time, by the substitution of one or more elements of the set in such a way that a different discourse is produced through variation (Dias,  2019). In this variation, within a discursive process of argumentation (Orlandi, 2023), the element that changes already produces this "different discourse" as it promotes a dispute in relation to who would be the (true) victim, producing an effect of meaning of invalidation, both of the crime against Marielle Franco and of the gesture of denunciation itself textualized by the hashtag. Therefore, our proposal is to understand how, in this specific case, the displacement of the victim position works, thinking about its effects on political-social confrontations.