EFL Brazilian teachers in the hypermodern world: prêt-à-porter subjects, social media and discourse

Resumo

As researchers, we have been increasingly drawn to focus our investigation on both teachers’ and students’ posts on social media online networks, especially those held in community pages. Our aim is to reflect upon the representations and identity processes which have emerged from objectifying and/or subjectifying processes which are constituted by / constituting of power/knowledge relationships, established by the means of digitalmediatic discourse. We believe that the study of the interconnectivity between identity and technology in the identity constituting process of educational subjects will somehow contribute to clarify the implications that identity practices hold in the schooling of educational managers/stakeholders and teachers as well as to in-service teachers’ instruction. Adopting a discursive-deconstructive perspective of Discourse Analysis, we look upon some posts taken from interactions on social network pages on Facebook. The underlying theoretical and methodological views are grounded on Foucault´s literature discussions of power and subjectivity and on the discussions proposed by Ferreira (2008). The latter offers us a methodological-analytic perspective for the network discourse based on the rhizome structure developed by Deleuze & Guatarri (2000). We then borrow from Lipovetzky & Seroy’s (2005.2008.2015)discussions our take on contemporary processes and society. Grounded in Foucault´s perspective of language as a social practice; an action upon / onto others (FOUCAULT, 1996) we see that Facebook communities might be unveiled as disciplinary utilities which are a perfect match to the consumerist contemporary society – one where anthropophagical and autophagic processes rein. The analysis highlights the constitution of a hedonistic subject which shows up from both anthropophagical and autophagic processes materialized by instances of auto-referential/ referential mentions translated into digital (multimodal) illustrations and by exaggeratedly recalling to self-narratives. Such narratives suggest an attempt to answer a hypertrophied aesthetical call from a hyper Narcissus which has strategically been construed as an irresistible Don Juan.