“Your handout also kills.”: a discursive analysis of reactions to campaigns against handouts on Instagram

Abstract

This paper proposes to reflect on campaigns against the donation of alms to homeless people, which have become frequent
in some Brazilian cities. Our objective is to identify the main theses defended by the segments responsible for these campaigns
and by the people who support them. For this, we will take as corpus some posters that were published on Júlio Lancellotti's
Instagram, and the comments of internet users in favor of the campaigns, published on the same Instagram. For the description
and analysis of the data, we used the assumptions of the Semiolinguistic Theory of Discourse, which allowed us, from the
description of the main procedures associated with the modes of enunciative, descriptive, narrative and argumentative organization, proposed by Charaudeau (2008)1, to identify the imaginaries represented in the discourses in question. From our analysis, we found that the discourses against alms are based on ethical and pragmatic values based on the thesis that donations are directly responsible for keeping people on the street and for all the damage that this can cause.