The meanings of grief in the covid-19 pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

Taking a heterogeneous corpus built with clippings of speeches and gestures by the President of the Republic, cartoons and discourses of and about the memorials honoring pandemic victims, our objective is to understand how grief has been signified in and by the Brazilian society in the context of the pandemic of COVID-19. While it kills hundreds of thousands of Brazilians, the COVID-19 pandemic imposes restrictions on funerals, which are a fundamental part of the necessary signification of grief. In Brazil, society positions itself in different ways in relation to this situation. President Bolsonaro silence the pandemic and grief and trivialize death. Cartoonists denounce this fascist and negationist policy. Other artists create memorials in architectural or biographical form by which the bereaved can signify the loss of loved ones in a new and aesthetic way. These artistic expressions constitute forms of resistance to the negationist policy, the banalization of death and death itself. The work mobilizes theoretical categories of the Materialist Discourse Analysis and of the Psychoanalysis.