Violence, feminine word: a genealogical study of the narratives on violence against women in Diario de Pernambuco
violence against women; media; discourse; gender; power.
The study discusses the discursive construction of violence against women in and by the media, from the analysis of texts published by Diario de Pernambuco between 1969 and 2016. As theoretical and methodological foundation, we based our work on Orlandi’s (1999, 2017) and Pêcheux’s (1998, 2014) ideas about the Discourse Analysis and on Nietzsche’s (2005, 2009) and Foucault’s (1999, 2018a) reflections on the genealogical method of historical investigation. In order to debate the phenomenon of violence and their specific takes on women and the feminine, we employ the concepts of Nietzsche (2005, 2009), Arendt (1985), Butler (2020), Saffioti (2010) and Foucault (2014, 2018a, 2018b) on the subject. Among the parcial results, we observed that struggle of signification is present in the journalistic discourse from news about passionate crime, seduced girls and “matters of honor”, published at the transition from the 1960’s to 1970’s, to the legal and media recognition of the gender factor on women’s murders on the first decades of 2000s. We also noticed that, whereas discussing the “same” matters, the media coverage on violence against women has a contingent component, that varies more or less according to the gender and sexuality conventions of each moment, the discursive formation in each case and the social status and the former behavior of both the victim and the perpetrator of the violent act.