Beautiful, modest and housewife: what literary text mining tell us about male and female characterization
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2023.e86749Keywords:
Digital Humanities, Corpus Linguistics, Text Mining, Gender StudiesAbstract
This paper presents the results of a research that combines quantitative and qualitative methods on discursive representations that focus on gender. Our goal is to identify how male and female characters are characterized in literary texts, and for that we explore a corpus of Brazilian literature with 5 million words, annotated with semantic and morphosyntatic information. The study is conducted along two directions: observing the predicates present in characters’ description and the actions performed by them. As a result, (i) we indicate how the methodology used allows different perspectives on the data, going beyond the analysis based on forms and frequency lists, and (ii) we ratify the stereotyped construction of male and female in the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, with the female being characterized mainly by appearance, especially beauty, and by the domestic sphere.
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