The politician in erasure, evidence and attenuation

relations between race, class and gender in booklets that thematize the Coronavirus for the LGBT+ population

Abstract

In this essay, I take as a corpus two booklets that thematize COVID-19 for LGBT+ people, namely Saúde LGBT em tempos de pandemia de COVID-19 (2020), produced by the Secretaria Municipal da Saúde de Salvador, and Já sabe o que fazer para se proteger do novo coronavírus? Se liga (2020), produced by the extinct Ministério da Mulher, da Família e dos Diretos Humanos. Based on Materialist Discourse Analysis, the objective of this text is to understand how raciality crosses the discursive processes of booklets that do not thematize race, but gender, sexuality and health, due to the effects of silencing, contradiction, metaphor, paraphrase, parody, etc. (MODESTO, 2021). The analysis gestures indicate an individua(liza)tion of the subject by the State as responsible for health and as a subject of rights and duties (ORLANDI, 2013). There is, to some extent, an erasure of race, class and gender relations. However, there is a contradiction: sometimes it disappears, sometimes class issues become evident. The analysis points out that, when class is in the order of explicitness, race is always in the order of implicitness. Finally, there is also a game of meanings that mitigate (and erase) issues of race, class and gender in the booklets.