Dispositivo de hos(ti)pitalidade estrangeira: uma análise discursiva de enunciados jornalísticos acerca do acolhimento aos médicos cubanos no Brasil

Abstract

In 2013, the More Doctors for Brazil Project (PMMB) was implemented by the Federal Government, during the administration of President Dilma Rousseff, as an attempt to solve two problems of the Unified Health System (SUS), being: I) the difficulty of recruiting doctors to serve the population in remote and difficult-to-access regions of Brazil and II) the low supply of doctors specializing in family and community health. Law No. 12,871, of October 22, 2013, which enacts the creation of the Mais Médicos Program (PMM) is the starting point of this research. The law allowed the migration of foreign doctors to work in interior regions of Brazil through the PMM, and what we understand to be a discursive event (Foucault, 2020), resulted in the circulation of disputed discourses, especially about Cuban doctors, who vary between hospitality and hostility. The general objective of this research is to investigate the discursive functioning of hostility towards Cuban doctors in Brazil, in an analysis of online newspapers, based on Michel Foucault's concept of dispositive (2023). The specific objectives are: I) togather discursive materialities in the newspapers Gazeta do Povo and Carta Capital that constitute discourses about Cuban doctors in Brazil, whether hostile or not; II) identify discursive regularities in the dispute over the truth about Cuban doctors; and III) analyze statements that discuss violence and resistance against Cuban doctors. Like Derrida (2003), we believe that hospitality to a foreigner is not always just hospitable or just hostile, it can be hostility, a concept coined by the philosopher to deal with the mixture of ways of welcoming a foreigner (Kristeva, 1994). The research problem understood, then, is the variation of hostile and hospitable discourses about Cuban doctors in Brazil. The question that guided this research is: how did Cuban doctors, in Brazil, become the object of ambivalent, contradictory and disputed discourses? From the analysis of statements in four online newspapers (Gazeta do Povo and Carta Capital) we observed the tensions and disputes over the “truth” about Cuban doctors. The theoretical-methodological perspective is anchored in the analysis of French discourse, centered on Foucauldian discursive studies (Foucault, 2002, 2006, 2008, 2020, 2023), with the use of concepts such as discourse, statement, device, knowledge-power, among others. Using Foucault's archaeogenealogical method and Derrida's notion of hostility, we investigated the discursive functioning of a device on the reception of Cuban doctors in Brazil. The results demonstrate that during the period of activity at the PMM, Cuban doctors were repeatedly compared with Brazilian doctors and health professionals of other nationalities. Furthermore, the hospitality device demonstrated that mechanisms of normalization, control and selectivity worked in the (un)welcome of Cubans, which resulted in subjectifications and objectifications with the use of terms such as “slaves”, “unqualified”, “ gods”, among others. The research points to a need for more in-depth studies on the selectivity of Brazilians when welcoming foreigners within the scope of humanities, linguistic studies and, in particular, discourse analysis.