Journalism through the prism of gender: discourse and production of meanings in the text to reader relation

Abstract

Understanding gender as an analytical, epistemological category pervaded by the concept of power (SCOTT, 1995; BONETTI, 2009) and journalism, as well as its relationship with readers, as a privileged locus of production and circulation of cultural values in our society, this research is based on post-structuralist feminist studies and on the theoretical-methodological contribution of Discourse Analysis (AD), examining two journalistic reports that deal with gender identity and the meanings produced by readers in 927 Facebook comments. Looking journalism from a gender perspective, we noticed that the report that was constructed with a feminine bias, opening space for subjectivity and emotion, produced, in more than 44% of the public, meanings related to empathy, opening breaches of encounter with the Other.