O imaginário e o real na discursivização sobre estupro no seriado inacreditável

Abstract

Discourses that discredit women in cases of rape accusations continue to appear; along with them, others emerge that mitigate the perpetrator's guilt and transfer it to the victim; sometimes the occurrence of the crime is denied, discrediting the victim; other times these discourses emerge as statements that blame the woman, attributing the violence to her behavior, clothes, or posture. The issue is that rape is trivialized because there is a memory that the female body is subservient to male will; in some cases, when the woman reports the assault, efforts are made to discredit the victim. From this context, this study aims to analyze the series "Unbelievable," produced and aired by the streaming platform Netflix, to understand the discursive practice circulating in the series about rape. Based on the theoretical scope of French discourse analysis, especially in the texts of Pêcheux (1971, 1990, 1995, 1999, 2011, 2014, 2015) and Orlandi (1992, 1994, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2013), the aim is to elucidate the ideological, imaginary, and/or scientific assumptions supported about women in cases of rape accusations. The research corpus consists of discursive sequences extracted from the 8 episodes of the series in question and highlights the discourses of the subjects involved in the investigations of rapes portrayed by the series. The analytical movement allows us to perceive that the meanings of rape and the rape victim in the series "Unbelievable" point to two opposing positions: for the male police officers responsible for investigating the protagonist's rape and for her family members, the validation of the accusation goes through an analysis of the victim's past life, which needs to meet the requirements of the imagination present in the memory of what is necessary to be legitimately a victim, and the woman's word is not accepted; on the other hand, for the female police officers responsible for investigating other rape cases in the series, the accusation leads to a different attitude towards investigative procedures, whose attitude of fact-checking and acceptance of the accusation does not go through the filter of legitimizing the complaining victim. The results indicate that the exercise of discrediting the victim who reports a rape is related to historical practices internalized in society that are not broken, in light of the interests at stake; however, the ideological determinations that hover over the subjects are not without being confronted with imperatives of the order of science and reality that have the power to curb the imaginary and bring the reality of the facts to light