Memoráveis e sentidos: um estudo semântico-enunciativo da designação da palavra Cigano no Youtube

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze the use of the term “Gypsy” on YouTube based on the premises of Eduardo Guimarães’s Theory of Event Semantics (2002, 2005, 2007a, 2018). This dissertation draws on theoretical and methodological concepts and categories—such as Enunciation, Enunciative Scene, Rewriting, Articulation, and Semantic Domain of Determination (SDD)—coined by the author to understand aspects related to the meanings associated with the term under analysis. Considering the specific characteristics of online discourse, we also draw on discussions regarding the “cyberspace of enunciation” as discussed by Reis (2015), a notion related to the concept of “space of enunciation” proposed by Guimarães (2002). To achieve this objective, we analyzed utterances taken from two YouTube videos and their respective comments, namely, “The Mystery of the Romani People Throughout History” and “What Is the Origin of the Romani People?”, selected due to their widespread circulation on the platform and the high number of comments associated with the posts. Our research questions focus on understanding what terms are used to refer to Roma in the selected YouTube videos and comments and which historical memories are mobilized through these terms. We are also interested in observing how historical memories and contemporary discourses about the Roma people influence the construction of meanings regarding them, as well as investigating the main themes and narratives associated with the discourses circulating on the chosen platform. We start from the hypotheses that the designations circulating on YouTube regarding the Romani people draw upon historically crystallized meanings, thereby keeping stereotypical and prejudiced meanings about them in circulation; however, we also hypothesize that the word “Romani” may be undergoing a process of re-signification over time as a response to the political and historical transformations that have marked the process of exclusion and marginalization of this group. After analyzing the corpus, we found that our hypotheses were confirmed; the analysis of how the term “Gypsy” is used on YouTube allowed us to observe that many of the themes and narratives regarding this group still relate to stereotypical and prejudiced discourses, with Gypsies being referred to as: “those who teach diabolical things,” “sorcerers,” “gold counterfeiters,” “troublemakers,” and “disruptors of the system,” that is, there is a recurring pattern of narratives that associate this people with illicit, mystical, or disorderly practices, which highlights the resurgence of memorable tropes that contribute to the perpetuation of prejudices against them, even when, in some cases, the speaker appears not to endorse these labels. It was also observed that the construction and legitimization of representations regarding this group remain linked to meanings crystallized during historical periods in which the history of the Romani was disseminated from the non-Romani perspective, thereby perpetuating simplified and stereotypical representations of the Romani people, the normalization of which contributes to the perpetuation of prejudice and, consequently, hatred toward them. However, some utterances also point to processes of re-signification of the word “Gypsy,” especially in discursive events that challenge these crystallized meanings. These results reinforce the idea that the cyberspace of enunciation not only reproduces but also reconfigures historically crystallized discourses about the Romani people.