O discurso sobre a criança feliz: o governo da população infantil brasileira

Abstract

The present work constitutes a study on the discursive practices in the field of the infancy and has as theoretical-methodological the Discourse Analysis from the assumptions of the analytic of power of Michel Foucault, mainly, those that refer to the notions of discourse, knowledge, biopower and governmentality. The construction of the research object from these Foucaultian tools enables a better understanding of how children are increasingly targets of attention and control of the discursive mechanisms of governance that express conceptions and directions in the establishment of life forms and behavioral patterns to form and to conduct the objects of which they speak and their historicity. The corpus used is composed of the following legal discourses: Law No. 13,257 of March 8, 2016, which provides for public policies for early childhood, and Presidential Decree No. 8.869, of October 5, 2016, which establishes the Happy Child Program. Taking the legal discourses for early childhood as an object of study, this dissertation seeks to discuss power-knowledge relations that affect the body and life of the Brazilian child population, analyzing established and legitimized meanings about the child subject and forms of governance that are orientated in this institution of meanings in the area of education and care of the child and in the conduct of their conduct, as well as that of adults in this conduct of conduct. It starts from the hypothesis for investigation that the discursive institution of the legislations on the infancy constitutes senses of manufacture of infantile identities in consonance with processes of formation of the child like correlated human capital of the neoliberal entrepreneurial society, in the perspective of the economic behavior denominated by Foucault of homo oeconomicus. In order to problematize our questions from the analyzed legal discourses directed towards the infancy, other glances can be launched and other questions provoked, since the objective of this investigative work was not to discover and to point truths, but to reflect and to extend the discussion on the processes of child's governance in the contemporary world in the manufacture of children's subjects capable of engaging in the future in the current economic-social logic.