Narrative, time and memory: subjectivities about the vaccine and its political effects on health

Abstract

Narratives are produced, put into circulation and serve as references for social actors to give meaning to their actions. Based on this communication circuit and the way the so-called commercial media constructs its statements, we have been interested in observing how the meanings about the vaccine and vaccination, compulsory or not, that have circulated during the covid-19 pandemic in the newspapers Correio Braziliense, O Globo and O Estado de São Paulo have been constructed and how much these meanings are immersed - and to what extent they can be understood - in a field of disputes. Understanding this process from the perspective of the field of Communication and Health, it becomes possible to identify traces, clues, signs of a complex game that is established around the way in which the right to health can be exercised. These narrative strategies, intertwined with time and memory, configure forms of action in the world whose marks are very long-lasting. By using the aesthetic-expressive paradigm to identify these characteristics, it becomes possible to understand that resorting to a certain immunizer over others is less than a simple individual choice. Rather, it is an effect of the way in which health, and especially the Brazilian Unified Health System, has been presented for almost four decades.