An explanatory and critical study about journalistic narratives and the problematization of gender

Abstract

Identifications like travesty, transsexual, transgender, g0y characterize “others” who don’t follow the heteronormative conception about sexual and gender identities. They constitute subversive performativities as well as political actions that denaturalize the binary, hierarchical and attributive matrix. This motivates the development of Queer researches along critical and discursive studies to problematize these new kinds of expressions of identities, and its constitution as a discursive and social processes. The objective of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the journalistic narrative about the transvestite Rogéria, in an article published in the “Vida” section, in the September issue of 2013, revised in RG magazine (Registro Geral do que interessa), a monthly publication of Carta Editorial. From the theoretical and methodological framework proposed by Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) and Fairclough (2003) on the dialectical relation among genre, discourse and style as practices that signify actions, representations and social identifications, we conclude that RG perpetuates an essentialist conception about sexual and gender identities, as well as restricts the construction of Rogéria to the context of concerts and shows. So, considering the media’s potential to form public opinion and its predominant voice in the text, we realize that the story does not widen the debate on corporeality and gender; on the opposite, it reproduces a transvestite stereotype as an artistic allegory.

Keywords: discourse, performativity, travesty.