Representações da mulher esportista brasileira sob a ótica da Análise de Discurso Crítica: o jornalismo esportivo sobre elas, feito por elas e comentado por elas

Abstract

The present thesis elaborates on the representation of Brazilian female athletes in sports journalism. In order to develop the research, we did not focus on a traditional media vehicle where power is concentrated in men's hands and the focus is mainly directed at them. The study paves the way for the representations of Brazilian female athletes in an alternative media platform, the website called Dibradoras, one of the few media platforms specialized in sports journalism, led exclusively by women and dedicated to women's presence in sports. The main objective of the research is to identify, analyze, and understand the discursive representations of Brazilian female athletes that are constructed on and by the Dibradoras website, how the Dibradoras website is evaluated by female journalists, as well as the written and published texts on the Dibradoras website, and what the constructed meanings are by female readers – students from the Journalism course at the Federal University of Uberlândia – based on these texts. Thus, the corpora are constituted by three data sets, namely: (1) journalistic texts published on the Dibradoras website in 2021, related to the Tokyo Olympic or Paralympic Games; (2) data generated through interviews with female journalists who are authors of the selected texts from the Dibradoras website; and (3) data generated through a focus group conducted with women, students in the Journalism course at the Federal University of Uberlândia, who analyzed the texts from the Dibradoras website. The guiding theoretical and methodological foundations involve Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), specifically the dialectical-relational approach proposed by the British linguist Norman Fairclough, and the approach to the representation of social actors by Theo van Leeuwen, in dialogue with Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly in relation to the Transitivity system. In addition, the studies regarding sports journalism and the presence of women as athletes, media professionals, and readers/consumers in the sports environment are also discussed in the theoretical part. On one hand, for the analysis of the data generated by the journalistic texts, the categories used are evaluation, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and the representation of social actors; on the other hand, the analysis of the data generated through interviews and a focus group is based on the category of evaluation, associated with the macro-themes present in each material. The analysis of the journalistic texts demonstrates that Brazilian female athletes on the Dibradoras website are represented as active forces, in a personalized manner, through individualization, nomination, and classification. The focus group participants highlight that the representations of Brazilian female athletes presented by the Dibradoras website are tied to the themes of struggle/overcoming, professionalism, and humanization. Furthermore, through interviews with journalists from the Dibradoras website, it is possible to perceive the gender-based treatment discrepancy, the fight for the deconstruction of female objectification, and the importance of media vehicles developing feminist sports journalism, where sports practiced by women are treated with the same respect and space that sports practiced by men receive in traditional media. Thus, highlighting the representations of Brazilian female athletes on the Dibradoras website, understanding, through the voices of those who produce this content, how these representations are constructed, and analyzing how a group of Journalism students received these texts highlight the importance of promoting women's presence in the sports sphere through feminist sports journalism, as traditional media remains influenced by patriarchal and sexist ideas and continues to prioritize men's sports.