A representação dos atores sociais e a imagem da mulher no contexto do discurso feminista em contos de Marina Colasanti

Abstract

The book Contos de amor rasgados, by Marina Colasanti, was published in 1986, a decade of consolidation of all the achievements conquered by the Brazilian feminist movement (Pinto, 2003), which fought for a change in mentality, in social practices e in discourses about the women s conditions (ibid.). In the short stories, however, the woman portrayed is represented in a peculiar way, breaking all expectations of a positive image that a feminist author should bring about. This study is an analysis which focuses on some details about the representation of social actors in short stories that intend to carry the discourse of women s liberation. To do so, we selected ten representative stories from the book and analyzed them in accordance with van Leeuwen s sociosemantic system for the representation of social actors (1997) and Halliday s Functional-Systemic Linguistics. Our approach in this study is also based on Fairclough s Critical Discourse Analysis (1995), as he has been dedicating his studies to discourse and social change, of which feminism is an expression of. In this sense, however, Bourdieu (2005) asserts that very little has really changed despite the feminist movement, since man s domination and symbolic violence still prevail. Van Leeuwen s categories, such as exclusion and inclusion of social actors in discursive representations, is our tool for a detailed analysis of the relationship between men and women, revealing the feminist questions described by Pinto (op. cit.) and highlighted by Boudieu (op. cit.), which are included in the stories. The results demonstrate that the woman in the stories was sometimes completely excluded, sometimes backgrounded, and some other times made weak by passivation in relation to her partner/husband/boyfriend/lover. The conflicts generated by the actions of men towards women confirm the concerns of the feminist discourse