Representações discursivas da moda no filme The Prime of Miss JeanBrodie

Abstract

Fashion, in this thesis, considered to be a communicative tool crossed over for effects of meanings involved in social practices, is the focus of the analysis of the discursive setting of the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). The objective is to investigate in which ways fashion materializes discourses throughout the clothes style, as it unveils the teacher´s behavior, beliefs, teaching practice and ideology. According to Garcia and Miranda´s view (2010), to whom fashion is communication, its interpretation can lead us to the understanding of experience, memory and links of the subject of the discourse. Placed in Scotland in the 1930s, the film narrative is divided into 17 sequences located in contextual spaces ─ the school, the street and the house ─, thus named by me, due to the use of Lefebvre´s concept of social/abstract space (2007). Miss Brodie, the teacher, performs her function incessantly, that is, without restraining herself to the school schedule and physical spaces, for her aim is to provide her distinct group of girl students ─ la crème de la crème ─, with readiness for the practical life, fact that raises the question of professional responsibility. Such a trajectory, besides showing a permanent conflict between the subject and the educational institution, determines its referentiality in the teacher´s fashion. Such a relationship attests her movement of social inclusion/exclusion. The analytical procedures applied to the verbal and imagistic materiality are also based on the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) categories, as it is proposed by Norman Fairclough (2001), combined with principles of the visual design by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) and with the perspective of the social gender according to feminist critics´ view, such as Joan Scott (1990), Teresa de Lauretis (1994) and Jane Flax (1991) among others. My approach to the theme takes into account the cultural, the social and the historical context in which one can read in the teacher´s fashion the basis of women s role as teachers