Heteronormatividade e variação lexical nos sinais em Libras

Abstract

This work investigates how heteronormativity is evident in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) through signs related to gender and sexuality, considering the linguistic attitudes of the speakers. Gender and sexuality identities are the central issue of Queer Theory, which questions the norms by which some bodies are marked, and others are not. From this point of view, gender and sexuality are independent of genital anatomy, however, in our culture, it is assumed (or expected) that all bodies are cisgender and heterosexual, which leads us to discuss the linguistic practices that maintain this conception. Libras is a visual-motor language and many of its signs arise from the visual characteristic of the referents, which is defined as “iconicity”; it is also heterogeneous, hence, it has linguistic variation. Therefore, I propose to investigate the signs of “heterosexual”, “gay” and “lesbian”, their variants and their etymologies; as well as the interaction of Libras with Portuguese, the language that maintains the majority status in Brazil; and the conception of gender and sexuality that circulates in the linguistic practices of the deaf community. This analysis will start from theoretical linguistic assumptions supported by Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV,1972 [2018]), whose target audience of the investigation was the deaf community of the Metropolitan Region of Recife, focusing attention on the domain of evaluation in the face of variable linguistic forms. Furthermore, to measure these attitudes, I performed tests based on works such as those by Cardoso (2015), Lambert & Lambert (1981), Likert (1932) and Rokeach (1974), and for the analysis and discussion of the semantic load of the signs, I resumed the works by Butler (2018), Capovilla et al (2019), Lanz (2017), Santos (2019) and Veloso (2020). From the point of view of methodology, it is field research, descriptive, comparative, statistical and qualitative. Added to this, the form instrument was applied, through interviews with 22 deaf collaborators, whose sexualities are distributed among gays, lesbians, heterosexual men and heterosexual women. The collected data were processed by BioEstat software version 5.3, SPSS Version 27 and tabulated for comparative and statistical analysis. The main sustained and confirmed hypothesis was that heteronormativity is revealed in Libras through the morphological or iconic etymology of signs related to gender and sexuality identities considered here. In addition, from the perspective of Variationist Sociolinguistics, it was not possible to observe that the LGBTQIAP+ community uses different variants of the heterosexual and cisgender community. The results pointed to the perception of negative stereotypes related to the visuality of signs in these identities; no HETEROSEXUAL sign was considered offensive, unlike two LESBIAN signs and one GAY sign; the use of the HETEROSEXUAL variant, identical to the sign of HUMAN, is verified by the community, with the differentiation depending on the context; there was homogeneity in the recognition of the variants by all the researched groups; and there was a difference in linguistic attitudes between people with different gender and sexuality identities, age ranges and education in the evaluation of certain attributes. For these reasons, this work is relevant for Libras speakers who understand themselves within, or are interested in, dissident gender and sexuality, in the sense of being aware of the use of the signs of "gay", "lesbian" and " heterosexual".