The subject's decentering through discourse and its effects

relationship between social position and subject position in speech

Abstract

In this paper, we aimed to demonstrate how social position determines the subject position in discourse by shifting through different discursive formations. To achieve this, we conducted analyses on the discourse of the current São Paulo State deputy, Arthur do Val (Podemos), driven by his statement that Ukrainian women are easy because they are poor, in order to observe how the individual is interpellated into a subject when he is discursively constituted, decentering itself in its speech by representing diverse subject positions based on the individual's social position. Therefore, we analyzed the case, although not exhaustively, in three different situations, namely: a) an audio shared via WhatsApp, in which he expresses a sexist view of Ukrainian women; b) the apology speech for what was said in the audio; and c) the defense speech in the process of his mandate's revocation due to what was said in the audio. In the analyses, we observed that, as the subject moves through different discursive formations, the subject disperses itself into different subject positions, amidst the impasse of discursive heterogeneity, allowing it to shift from a sexist position, through a responsible stance, to a combative maneuver, in an attempt to disassociate from the weight of responsibility in the mandate revocation process attributed to him due to what he uttered.