A educação de surdos no estado novo: práticas que constituem uma brasilidade surda

Abstract

The Dissertation aims to examine the practices that worked in the constitution of a deaf Brazilianness, i.e., of a deaf Brazilianness normality. Seeking for practices that entail deaf subjectivities throughout the history of deaf education in Brazil, this study is approached within the context of Getúlio Vargas’ government, also known as New State (1937-1945): a moment in the history of country characterized by developments of modernization, industrialization and urbanization which, along with the educational reform, kept in tight relation with the nationalization plan. To do so, five documentary sources held by the National Institute for Deaf Education (INES) were analyzed, being it the first institution devoted to deaf education in Brazil. The documents were: the Pedagogia emendativa do surdo-mudo manual (1934), the report Atividades e documentos estatísticos do Instituto Nacional de Surdos-Mudos (1937), the report O Instituto Nacional de Surdos-Mudos (1942), the manual Vamos falar – cartilha para uso das crianças surdas brasileiras (1946) and the report Os surdos-mudos no Brasil segundo Censo Demográfico de 1º de setembro de 1940 (1948). Parting from a theoretical-methodological approach on the Foucaldian studies in Education, the concept of governmentality was used as a grate of intelligibility under which the reading of the document was made. It is important to highlight the significance of the formation on statistics and medical-pedagogical knowledge about deafness and deaf people to the establishment of educational norms which could rule the behavior of these subjects towards a normality possible to be governed. It is proposed, in this sense, to understand the normalization of the deaf, through precise techniques and strategies to wield a linguistic government as a way that national identity could be attached to a deaf subject willing and convenient to the interests of the New State. The deaf, once users of the vernacular language, would cease to be ‘foreign’ and become governable citizens, capable of joining in the productive sphere that would turn Brazil into a modern country.