Libras and dissidence: towards a linguistics of difference and against structural audism

Abstract

The article discusses Libras as a dissident language and an epistemological practice that challenges the foundations of traditional linguistics and the hierarchies imposed by structural audism. Grounded in Critical Applied Linguistics, the Philosophy of Difference, and Deaf and Decolonial Epistemologies, the study understands language as a political and enunciative practice that produces modes of existence and resistance. Libras is analyzed as a territory of theoretical and ethical insurgency, capable of displacing phonocentric conceptions and repositioning the Deaf subject as a producer of knowledge. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative and interpretive approach, based on critical discourse analysis of theoretical and cultural productions about deafness and difference. The corpus consists of texts and discourses that reveal the effects of audism on the constitution of linguistic knowledge and the construction of Deaf identities. It concludes that Libras acts as a language of epistemic dissidence, establishing a linguistics of difference that displaces the centrality of voice and affirms other ways of existing, signifying, and resisting.