A mulher no discurso midiático: candidatas à Prefeitura Municipal de Porto Alegre e suas representações na mídia nas eleições 2008

Abstract

This paper examines marks of gender in the discourse of interviews published on the ClickRBS website, with the candidates for mayor of Porto Alegre, RS in the 2008 elections. The objective is to analyze, based on the interview and profile genres, the way in which women candidates were treated linguistically in comparison with their male counterparts. The issues underlying the study are related to the gender ideology informing this type of media discourse, in order to verify whether the representation of women candidates carry traditionally feminine traits or whether they receive the same masculine characteristics attributed to their male oponents. The theoretical basis is Critical Discourse Analysis, which focuses on a wide variety of textual types, considering the combination of written and imagetic forms reccurrenly used by journalism and publicity, in their relation to social structures and social change. Due to its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature, CDA allows the investigation of issues related to power and ideology in discourse, using gender, among others, as a category for the analysis of social representation. Because it is also closely related to other areas of social activity, media discourse, when examined through the lenses of ADC, can illuminate the position of women in society both in a historical perspective and in its present relations with society and with politics. In this context, the Porto Alegre 2008 elections for mayor, with its eight candidates four women and four men has not yet been investigated. The hypothesis for the investigation is that, in spite of all the new technologies and of the contemporary social changes, electoral campaigns are still informed by a struggle between maintaining and challenging a conservative sexist discourse which still represents women as subordinated to men