A performatividade na formação do percurso éthico-estereotípico feminino em evidência nos e-books mais vendidos na Amazon Kindle Brasil

Abstract

Our first contact with Literature, in general, occurs orally during childhood, mainly through fairy tales, which carry within their structure a social representation of morality. By listening to these stories, we learn the social representations and the feminine and masculine ethé of our society. These fictional stories evolve throughout our lives, eventually transforming into novels of the most diverse styles. In light of this problematization, the present study analyzed how stereotypes and ethé construct the performativity of speech acts in female characters of novels that reach the top of the Amazon Kindle bestseller rankings. To that end, we considered female social roles and the protagonists’ stereotypes in the ethical trajectory built by the plot. To achieve this objective, we relied on the concept of ethical trajectory proposed by Holanda (2020); social representations were approached through the lens of Moscovici (1978); Goffman (1985) and his theory of representation, which brings us communicational, social, and behavioral aspects of collective life. Ethos was analyzed based on the studies of Maingueneau (2015) and Holanda (2020) on the ethical trajectory. Lastly, to address the issue of stereotypes, we drew on the studies of Amossy (2022). As for performativity, we relied on the studies of Austin (1990). The corpus is composed of fictional narratives collected from the Amazon Brazil website that are at the top of the bestseller ranking. To approach our central research question, we employed a qualitative and documentary methodology based on the works of Goffman (1985), Maingueneau (2015), Holanda (2020), and Austin (1990). We concluded that the ethical trajectory is built in three dimensions and that performativity is a key element in constructing this trajectory.