Representações do feminino: uma análise discursiva dos perfis jornalísticos de O Estado do Maranhão

Abstract

This work presents a study on the feminine representations in the news articles from the newspaper O Estado do Maranhão, that place the woman as central character. Moreover, we adopted a theoretical influence from the Critical Speech Analysis proposed by (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2001 and 2003a) that considers the speech as a form of social practice, an action way in the world and in the society. Our aim is to analyze how it is constituted the discourse in the social identity of the ludovicense woman who composes the journalistic profiles, the power relations present in this practice and the social implications from them. The corpus of the research consists of 26 extracts, selected from five profiles, having as criterion the analysis of the feminine representations in the action, representation and identification meanings present in the texts. The analysis categories used were the intertextuality, the interdiscourse, the modality and the evaluation. With the research, it was possible to prove that the media is a place of production, circulation and legitimacy of directions that act in the formation of individual and social identities. The analyzes had disclosed identity marks in the texts that reaffirm the differences between men and women according to the multiplicity of social role experienced by each of them, although the significant transformations in the familiar social relations. Yet, we observe an effect of denunciation in the analyzed news articles, once they point for the lack of respect to the rights equality and duties between the sexes. We also evidence that the question of the emancipation configures the subject most recurrent, returning the idea of the emancipated woman as the central element of “new woman”. However, the everyday woman is not inserted in the profiles: the women with this profile are the ones that had marked, in a privileged way, their presence. In sum, the analysis had proven that the profile of journalistic speech from the feminine figure is constructed in a paradox between elevate the presence of the woman in her professional area and arrest the values historically constituted.