Representações do gênero em artigos de divulgação científica sobre infarto do miocárdio

Abstract

The discursive representations of men and women are important factors for the establishment of gender relations and of the meanings attibuted to femininity and masculinity. In order to investigate how such representations occur in articles dealing with the popularization of medical knowledge in Brazilian weekly magazines, this research analyzes six articles about heart problems published in Veja, between 1999 and 2005. The theoretical basis is Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001), with emphasis on the representation of social actosrs (van Leeuwen, 1997) and on transitivity (Fuzer and Cabral, 2010). After determining which social actors were (more) represented in the texts and in which ways, and identifying the types of processes attributed to them, the results have shown that women are under-represented in this kind of text, in which we find no change in the historical construction of women as the other, even when it comes to issues of health and illness.