“They are too emotional”: Representations of gender, emotions and work in journalistic discourse

Abstract

This paper investigates the conceptions of gender in news stories about women and work. The aim is to comprehend how these media products represent women and witch subjectivities these discourses engender. From this point of view, we articulate theoretical and methodological keys in the communication field in order to think about the relations between media space and gender roles in contemporaneity. We analyse articles about women and work published between 2010 and 2013 in the magazines Época and Você S/A Edição para Mulheres, selected because of their relevance in Brazil. The methodology used is Foucauld’s discourse analysis, aided by a theoretical framework which mobilizes gender studies, based on a dialogue between Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, the concept of self-help journalism in Freire Filho and the relations between gendered roles and work as discussed by Dennis Mumby and Marcia Veiga. The results show the centrality of emotions in the separation and ranking of gendered performances: women are characterized as emotional beings, while men are associated with reasonable behaviors. The stories render invisible the power relations that are involved in the construction of these representations, take the production of masculine and feminine subjectivities out of the cultural field and situate them in the realm of nature. Ultimately, the magazine articles guide the management of these gendered abilities to maximize work performance. In this way, they produce subjectivities adjusted to the purposes of neoliberal capitalism.

Keywords: gender, emotions, work, journalism, discourse.