The Berenice Piana Law as a Discursive Event: Meanings of Autism in Public Policies, Social Discourses, and Memory
Berenice Piana Law; Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); Discourse Analysis; Discursive Event; Meaning Effects.
This research focuses on the Berenice Piana Law (Law No. 12.764/2012), analyzing it as a discursive event from the perspective of French Discourse Analysis. The law’s enactment is understood as a rupture in the ways of speaking about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as it reinscribes the autistic subject within the field of rights and citizenship. The central question guiding this study is: how does the Berenice Piana Law constitute itself as a discursive event in the production of meanings about autism in Brazil, displacing hegemonic discourses and establishing new subject positions within the field of inclusion policies? The general aim is to analyze the meaning effects produced by the emergence and circulation of this law in different discursive materialities. Specifically, the research seeks to: (i) identify the discursive formations that permeate discourses about autism before and after the law’s enactment; (ii) analyze displacements and continuities in meanings produced about the autistic subject; and (iii) understand the ideological effects of these discourses in their legal, media, and social materializations. The corpus comprises enunciations circulated in three discursive materialities: legislative documents and parliamentary speeches (legal); journalistic articles and interviews (media); and publications from social movements and activist mothers (social). The concepts of discursive formation, memory, interdiscourse, subject, and discursive event are mobilized to describe and interpret the meanings produced. The findings indicate that the Berenice Piana Law operates as a point of discursive inflection, activating memories and establishing new ways of speaking about autism, while also revealing disputes of meaning that continue to permeate its circulation.