Gender issues in Portuguese generalist newsmagazines: Thematic intersections at Sábado and Visão

Abstract

Generalist newsmagazines constitute an intersection among socioeconomic and political representations and the everyday life of individuals. This paper we introduce a thematic analysis of the two most read Portuguese newsmagazines: Sábado and Visão. We retrieved 440 news articles from 104 newsmagazines that match all the issues of the two newsmagazines in 2011. The empirical study was carried out with the support of the software Nvivo 10 and shows a transversality of both political and economic themes, which reflects the Portuguese and international conjuncture in the year of 2011. The most visible differences between the two newsmagazines indicate that there is a more frequent option for the themes Sexualities and Intimacies and Jet set in Sábado and for Health, leisure and well being at Visão. Moreover, what concerns the gender representations, that emerge in several themes, they generally arise in a binary way that transpose the look of gender to biological sex and that opposes the traditional representations of femininity and masculinity, conditioning the emergence of alternative representations.

Keywords: thematic analysis, Sábado, Visão, newsmagazines, covers, Nvivo.