The Taliban and the education of Afghan women: a form of silence, denunciation and resistance

Abstract

We aim to analyze the meaning effects meaning produced in an Instagram post composed of a photomontage, accompanied by a statement, which portrays the threat to the educational rights of Afghan women. Specifically, we aim to analyze and describe the discursive functioning of this threat as a form of silencing and, in the same way, to analyze how the struggle for the student rights of Afghan women has been a form of denunciation and resistance, textualized, mainly, through the non -verbal materiality. Therefore, the file corresponds to a photomontage circulated on Instagram at the time of (re)occupation by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The analysis was carried out based on the theoretical assumptions of Materialist Discourse Analysis, under the work of Pêcheux (1995), Orlandi (2005; 2007; 2020), Modesto (2015), Neckel (2015) and Souza (1997). With the analysis, we have observed how the Afghan female education, signified in the photomontage, suffers specific determinations of authoritarianism, silencing this public. However, due to the immediate context, we noticed resistance and denunciation movements working concomitantly. Therefore, even if it is a montage of a photograph, the elements that differentiate the photomontage from its original version somehow signify and will trigger other meaning effects, but which are related at some point to the original production.