When Life Becomes Work: Subjectivation and Resistance in the Neoliberal Fabric in “I Am Saving Myself for When Carnival Comes"

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Brazilian documentary Estou me guardando para quando o carnaval chegar (I’m Saving Myself for When Carnival Comes) (2019), directed and written by Marcelo Gomes, focusing on the unease provoked by the forms of life and labor in the city of Toritama (PE), known as the ‘Capital of Jeans’. Grounded in Foucauldian theoretical frameworks—particularly the notions of neoliberal governmentality, the conduct of conduct, and resistance—the article problematizes modes of subjectivation produced in a context marked by (self-)exploitation, the dissolution of boundaries between life and work, and the individualization of responsibility for success or failure. Methodologically, the study is situated within the French tradition of Discourse Analysis, taking scenes and utterances from the documentary as its analytical material. While revealing the capture of subjectivities by neoliberal rationality—expressed through the acceleration of time, the entrepreneurial self, and the naturalization of exhausting workdays—the analysis also identifies subtle gestures of resistance, materialized in the statements of characters who sustain other temporalities, practices, and modes of existence that partially escape the productivist imperative of the jeans industry. The article concludes that, even in contexts of intense subjection, resistance can emerge through small gestures, everyday refusals, and alternative ways of conducting one’s own life, producing fissures within the dominant neoliberal rationality.