Irenes: representações sobre homossexuais idosos no contexto midiático sob a perspectiva sistêmico-funcional

Abstract

In the LGBT community there are some dogmas which must be followed so that the homosexual is seen with good eyes by their peers: having a sexually attractive body, having an intense sexual life and always staying young. These fundamentals create a false impression that every gay is young, beautiful and attractive. However, it is known that the homosexual community is not formed only by young men. There are several groups of homosexuals which are not very esteemed by the gay community, such as transsexuals, transvestites, bears, and the elderly gays. From this information and taking into account the fact that one of the roles that language performs is to allow representations of the world and of ourselves to be manifested, this work aims to analyze through lexicogrammar functions and semantic elements: i) how elderly homosexuals are linguistically represented, ii) what are the social representations manifested about the group, and iii) what are the agents responsible for these representations. Therefore, the corpus is composed of 19 journalistic texts (2 opinion pieces, 7 newspaper reports and 10 news pieces) available over the Internet and that address the homosexuality in seniors. In order to identify what representations are manifested on elderly gays in the texts from the corpus, as well as to verify what lexicogrammar functions perform these representations, the analytical tool at the base of the analysis is the transitivity system from Systemic Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY & MATTHIESSEN, 2004). To analyze what agents are responsible for the representations found, we used the engagement system from the Appraisal Theory (MARTIN & WHITE, 2005). The results show that in the texts analyzed there are seven representations of elderly gays: lonely, victims of prejudice, politically helpless, active, invisible, marginalized, and victims of crimes. Furthermore, we concluded that the representing agents are both the sources which act on the texts and the media legal representative, the journalist or the writer.