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Plotting hope: Inverse stories and scalar reversals of a health crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2024

Branca Falabella Fabrício Open the ORCID record for Branca Falabella Fabrício [Opens in a new window]  and
Rodrigo Borba Open the ORCID record for Rodrigo Borba [Opens in a new window]
Branca Falabella Fabrício*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rodrigo Borba
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
*
Address for correspondence: Branca Falabella Fabrício Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Letras Anglo-Germânicas, Ilha da Cidade Universitária, Rio de Janeiro, BR 21941-901 [email protected]
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Abstract

This article investigates the discursive dimensions of the Zika epidemic in Brazil. It focuses on the ways the sanitary crisis is talked about by mothers of babies born with microcephaly—a Zika-related syndrome. We examine the situated ways these mothers refuse the biomedical and bureaucratic scripts that are handed down to them by engaging with their new realities and fostering hope against the grain of bleak prognosis. To do so, we scrutinize a corpus that comprises media reports covering the health emergency and ethnographic interviews. Resorting to strategies such as inverse stories, timespace anchorage, and scalar reversals, mothers of Zika inventively plot against painful scripts while reimagining their kids’ future (as well as theirs) in the present. They hope pragmatist hope without teleology. This chronotopic movement sheds light on how somber plots can be twisted through (re)scaling projects, thus forging hopeful actions. (Hope, narratives, scale, plot, epidemics, agency)

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 53 , Special Issue 5: Sociolinguistics of hope: Language between the no-more and the not-yet , November 2024 , pp. 835 - 856
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Funding for this research was provided by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, grant # 309794/2022-6, and Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, grant #s E-26/201.103/2021 and E-26/201.254/2021.

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