Fatherhood in pandemic times at the journalistic discourse

between biopolitical power and obedience/disobedience

Abstract

In this article enunciations from the journalistic scope are analyzed, specifically reports and/or news which discursive referential contemplates the syntagmatic expressions “pais na pandemia” and “pais separados na pandemia”. The state of discursive event that was given to the enunciative series allows to observe how the fatherhood performance, in pandemic times, scatters itself between “instituições, leis, vitórias e derrotas políticas, reivindicações, comportamentos, revoltas e reações” (FOUCAULT, 2014, p. 175). It is credited as an event because it became needed of evidence from the attendance to the sanitary measures indicated by the scientific knowledge to be justified. In addition, on this discursive production, legal actions are related to biopolitics due to the care for familiar and collective health. The analysis gives visibility to the operation of the legal field in the familiar relations, which one is grounded in the Science’s regime of truth and also in the biopolitics practices. Concomitantly to this power operation, the relation between freedom practices and obedience/disobedience ones, theorized by Gros (2018), is materialized; the last ones are explored upon their interlacing with the governmental power, which get together to the investigation of some paternal subjectivity portraits, in the journalistic discourse trails, when intertwining fatherhood to pandemics.