Women guerrilla fighters made (in)visible: Estadão’s view of Araguaia militants

Abstract

This article examines how O Estado de S. Paulo reported female participation in Araguaia Guerrilla from the beginning of the conflict, during the civil-military dictatorship, until 2023. The gendered perspective allows us to observe the erasure of the protagonism of female guerrilla fighters that takes place in newspaper articles. It can be seen how the newspaper almost always relegates these women to occasional and anonymized appearances, proposes an approach that objectifies them and places them in the shadow of men with whom they had relationships, or produces biographies that do not describe their trajectories and are narrated through the voice of tormentors, with an approach that revictimizes the militants. This way, we argue how Estadão’s coverage constitutes itself as a political gender violence based on journalistic practices.