Section: Gender and Communication
WHAT MEANS OTHERNESS? SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS AND (HETERO)NORMALISATION IN PORTUGUESE NEWSMAGAZINES
Sara I. MAGALHÃES, School of Psychology/University of Minho
Carla CERQUEIRA, Communication and Society Research Centre/University of Minho
Conceição NOGUEIRA, FPCE/University of Porto
Media play an important role in society allowing the construction and widespread of social representations as they are key to the maintenance of public sphere(s) (e.g. Wagner et al. 1999). However these are not always representative of peoples’ lives leading way to the creation of stereotypes. These are usually a biased socially constructed that when disseminated widely lead that a imbedded view of society. These are actually being reinforced daily by media and social values which makes its deconstruction harder. One of the main misrepresented issues is sexualities. Starting by focusing on gender asymmetries and binaries, sexuality is most often defined between essencialized male and female characters that are articulated within a heterosexual matrix (Butler 1993). Heteronormativity is therefore the main role model reference (Hodkinson 2011) as LGBT community seems to be often invisible with fewer references on media (Takács, 2006). Actually we can think of LGBT representation in media as a way of ‘symbolically annihilate’ (Tuchman, 1978) this community. Fewer references allow people to generalize this into binary divisions such as right/wrong, normal/not normal, healthy/unhealthy, despite having no scientific confirmation whatsoever of these common sense beliefs.
Within the project Gender in focus: social representations in Portuguese generalist newsmagazines (PTDC/CCI-COM/114182/2009) we intent to analyse all process of media construction. Here we will look at news contents trying to instigate awareness to the way news are made. Therefore, we’ll look discursively at the content of two Portuguese newsmagazines – Visão and Sábado – acknowledging the contents produced, who produces them, what is the main issue and what social discourses reify what is being said. Through critical discourse analysis we will analyse articles that approach sexualities (homo- and heterosexualities) and try to map the way these newsmagazines “speak” about sexualities. One of our main points will be absent discourses as we seek to understand what is the position of these newsmagazines towards social normalisation and the construction of otherness.