The emergence of the man consumer in the press: Historical articulations between the politics of consumption and gender in Brazilian journalism

Abstract

Based on the assumption that consumption was historically treated by the Brazilian press as a typically female issue throughout most of the 20th century, the purpose of this article is to analyze some of the historical aspects that mark the construction of the consumer-man in the Brazilian press. In other words, the objective is to map some of the discursive aspects from which the idea of man-consumer in Brazilian journalism was developed, in its differential relation with the stereotypical representation of female consumption. For this, a search for keywords in the Journal Digital Collection of the National Library was made to find texts that correlate the terms “man” and “shopping” and we applied the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis. From the obtained data, it was possible to infer that the discursive construction of the man-consumer in the press passed through historically demarcated representational phases that show the interrelations between representational practices and sexual policies that articulate issues of gender with those of consumption.

Keywords: communication, consumption, journalism, masculinities, history.