Análise polifônica de estereótipos na mídia: uma nova identidade para a mulher na maturidade?

Abstract

Until these days, the violence practiced by exaltation of youth discourses convey a model of devaluation of aging, as if desire and access to fundamental rights were forbidden for aging people. It is more meaningful for women who, until the XIX century, had the menopause as the edge of their reproductive life and the end of their womanhood. However, the ―grandma s‖ image is not the same. Many of them have the autonomy to enjoy both cosmetic advances and feminists achievements from the last decades. Post-modernity evidences such fast and deep social transformations, which create a tension that on one hand pumps the continuous establishment of a new social order and on the other hand presses continuously for changes. Although the rigidity of stereotypes themselves do not imply necessarily a false perception of reality, as they acquire high social stability and conventionality degree along time, even when the social actors who possess them have ulterior information which invalidate their content, they are rarely altered. Concerning the identity, understood as a continuously replaced description of ourselves, in the case of women it relates to hard and slow social changes, since each alteration must deconstruct historical processes from centuries of prejudices and beliefs that are solidly stratified. The way in which identities are built through language is fundamental for the definition of how we engage and engage others in discourse and create meanings. In this sense, media has a preponderant role in building new stereotypes and reinforcing old ones, reflecting ideas which make part of everyday social life, refracting concepts, distorting them in a way that they approach readers with the voice of an institution. A critical and feminist discourse analysis places discourses that intend to maintain power relations which favor men as a social group while exclude and weaken women as such. Though media is a space in which impartiality is believed to exist, we can evidence grammar forms present in such texts that signal the control on a social occasion, in this case, on the reportage genre, which is a favored place for social actors discursive confrontation. The methodology - which has a polyphonic character, because it is open for critical, systematic and dialogical voices, has combined Systemic Functional Linguistics, Dialogical Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches. The qualitative analysis revealed the existence of centripetal forces which search for closing, as well as discursive patterns so-called ―male‖, still directly responsible for mature women identity.