Four decades of Claudia magazine: a cartography of sociodiscursive imaginaries about the feminine in Brazilian media publications

Abstract

Considering the scenario of the new demands women are faced with in contem­porary society, this work focuses on the topic of the feminine representation mapped in Brazilian media publications. This paper aims, as its main objective, to investigate, from a diachronic per­spective, socio-discursive imaginaries of the feminine elicited from Claudia magazine covers in the course of four decades. To this end, this research is primarily based on the framework of the Semiolinguistic Discourse Analysis Theory, concerning the concepts of sociodiscursive imaginaries and the language subjects in dimensions of media, and the Textual Linguistics, with an inclination to the concept of frame. An examination of five Claudia magazine covers published between 1982 and 2021 is carried out with the aid of linguistic-discursive concepts considering the operations of identification and qualification. From the analysis proposed, it is possible to conclude that, in the last two decades, there has been a mindset change related to the sociodiscursive imaginaries of feminine, matching the idea of women who seek out to be the protagonist of social and political debates, beyond those that can be set in other fields of her everyday activity, otherwise associated with housework and aesthetic imagery.