Giving voice to the patient in vegetative state: biopolitical intersections of discourses on human life and female body

Resumo

This article focuses on media representation of two cases of
young women diagnosed with vegetative state for a prolonged period of time, the North-American Terri Schiavo and the Italian Eluana Englaro, and on how their bodies became signifiers of moral panic, embodying a threat to prevalent social norms through the possibility, which came to be concretised in both cases, of their being disconnected from the feeding tubes that maintained them alive. The bodies of these two patients, with “no evidence of awareness of self or environment and an inability to interact with others” (Multi-Society Task Force on PVS, 1994, p. 1500), and reduced to basic biological functions, such as breathing with preservation of sleep-wake cycles, became the site of conflicting discourses on life, namely on definitions of life, the kind of life that deserves to be kept alive, the role of political and social institutions in the preservation or elimination of such life, and, ultimately, on what it means to be human. Textual analysis of Portuguese online news on the Schiavo and Englaro cases will focus on the variety of biopolitical factions that articulate their own views on the legitimacy of life and the conditions of such legitimacy. These discourses, although not strictly gender-oriented, lend themselves to gendered readings, not least because these two cases involving young women were deemed as particularly newsworthy in the media, to the detriment of many other such cases that exist, involving individuals who are neither young nor women.