Existential constructions in memes about rape

a systemic-functional approach

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the meanings made by existential prayers, in memes, circulated on the social network Facebook, about “culpable rape”, an expression adopted by the website The Intercept, in the (re)categorization of the act suffered by Mariana Ferrer, a rape victim, whose defendant was acquitted in the judicial process, adopting as a theoretical framework the contributions of Halliday and Mathiessen (2014) and research developed by Fuzer and Cabral (2014) and Sá (2020, 2021a; 2021b). We adopted the qualitative methodology to categorize the uses of existential processes in the emerging meme text, which refer to the case of “culpable rape”. The results indicate a marked recurrence of prototypical existential processes, used to express positions in which the speaker does not textually mark authorship, confirming that the use of existential sentences is configured as a recurring resource for the production of statements in which the agent of the act of existing cannot be identified.