Eduardo Yuji Yamamoto
An important biopolitical mechanism in the communication system is the erasure of the “face” (Emmanuel Lèvinas). In this text, we present how this concept works through the Verônica Bolina case, a Brazilian transgender woman who was brutalized by the police. The text used a corpora formed by 5 journalistic articles, which help to contextualize the case, and by 3 images, which are the focus of our analysis. Discourse analysis is the method used to highlight three forms of erasure that work in this case: (1) the inhumanization; (2) the displacement of the victim’s position; (3) insertion into normative regimes. Finally, the text suggests that, in addition to an ethical awareness of humanization, openness to the face constitutes an urgent political device capable of promoting further engagement.
Keywords: Cultural studies; queer studies; digital journalism; image; discourse analysis.