Mulheres de ferro: a dupla jornada das operárias soldadoras na cidade do Rio Grande

Abstract

This quantitative research deals with the representation of welder women in Rio Grande city. The corpus consists of the welder women´s interviews, employed in the Ecovix/Engevix Construções Oceânicas, who are nowadays working in the Naval Cluster of the city. This thesis is based on the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) according to Norman Fairclough`s research principles and gender studies, and aims at examining these workers profiles, both professional and domestic, throughout the analysis of their discourse, understood as a result of these women`s social practice structured according to their ideologies and social relationship. From such a perspective, the double journey and the enrollment of these women in that profession, up to now a man´s job only, are the issues under discussion in this thesis. It leads us to investigate social-cultural issues that are present in the social imaginary such as the fact of associating the idea that women are subordinated to men, and the intellectual incompetence of production that affects the female figure. Although women have achieved many victories, and shaped a new sexual division of work, these prejudiced and hegemonic discourses are still found in many cultural artefacts and in society. This fact happens because society, still patriarchal, considers gender linked to biological issues and not to the theoretical view that places it within cultural issues. CDA is an interdisciplinary theory that proposes a tridimensional analysis of discourse that comprises text, discourse practice and social practice. Among the several possibilities of choosing among the categories of CDA in order to analyze the corpus, in this thesis, the selected ones are: vocabulary, intertextuality, politeness, and ethos.