A função performativa da linguagem como instrumento de naturalização de condições degradantes de trabalho na zona rural brasileira

Abstract

Despite the formal abolition of slavery, the consolidation of free labor in Brazil preserved the social and productive structures that had been in place in the country for more than three hundred years. Therefore, although the current Brazilian Penal Code expressly lays out the typical hypotheses that constitute the crime of reduction to a condition analogous to slavery, said criminal subsumption has been hindered by certain courts which, based on the socio-historical and geographical contexts of the victimized workers, use language as an instrument to naturalize degrading working conditions that would qualify under the legal framework. Hence, the scope of this paper is to identify the extent to which language choices employed in the case law of the Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region - the Brazilian Court with the largest number of cases dealing with said subject - would act, in the light of J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts, as an instrument capable of naturalizing, and therefore making more flexible, the degrading working conditions found in Brazil’s country zone.