Discourse, culture and forms of life: the housemaid as the face of Brazilian racism

Abstract

This paper is divided into two parts. The first concerns the discussion, drawing from theory, which aims to present the contours and challenges of contemporary semiotics that focus on new demands from society, attempting to describe and explain how the meaning of practices and forms of life is built. Therefore, we wish to demonstrate that the semiotics of discourse does not refuse history or the social and cultural dimensions of discourse as it takes meaning for its object, and that meaning emerges in the intersubjective relations, in the tension between the social and the individual, in the temporality of the world, and in discourse. The second part of this study discusses the semiotic status of the lexeme “housemaid”, seeking to handle the thick and resistant layers of meaning that maintain its uses in Brazilian society and that, in current history, play an important role in acknowledging the universes of values, social practices, and forms of life, deeply marked by racism and class discrimination.