Gênero em Carta Capital e Veja: proposta para a teorização do paragênero textual

Abstract

In this dissertation, gender representations in Carta Capital and Veja magazines are analyzed. It is presented the hypothesis of a paragenre, a genre of discourse that colonizes ad hoc journalistic texts produced to and/or about women. The main purpose of this study is to describe the paragenre. The corpus is integrated by features published in these magazines in March of 2009 and in March of 2013, aiming at data comparison of different periods. March was chosen because International Women s Day is celebrated in this month, when magazines usually publish special features for the female public, introducing thus exemplar or typical discourses (acc. FAIRCLOUGH, 2001). Concerning the editorial line, selected magazines are in opposite fields of ideology in Brazilian media scenery, which represents other relevant variable to a comparative study. The corpus examination is limited by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) principles, multidisciplinary theory that is aligned with other post-modern interpretations to social phenomena. Upon the CDA perspective, description of genres does not aim to describe them in detailed aspects of linguistic materiality, but those related to peculiar social-historical and ideological conditions to a production, since the genres are not stable, fixed or homogeneous and they can even present a high level of abstraction (acc. FAIRCLOUGH, 2006). The basic feature to identify them is thus in their correlation with a specific social practice or a network of practices. Therefore the study of Theo van Leeuwen (1997) on representation of social actors in discourse is presented as one of the theoretical contributions registered in CDA, guiding the text examination in this dissertation. It is also linked to the definitions of gender adopted herein, that means a social-cultural construction and a semiotic apparatus, representation and self-representation which is a result of social technologies, institutionalized epistemologies and daily life practices (acc. LAURETIS, 1994). Research results indicate that the hypothesis is consistent, once it was verified that there are constant asymmetries regarding the representation between men and women in different genres that compose the magazines, demonstrating with actional (text), representational (discourse) and ideational (styles) senses of paragenre (acc. FAIRCLOUGH, 2006, p.67). This is a high abstraction genre, supported by subgenres and in social practices that support asymmetrical representations of genders