Aspectos éticos

Introduction

This chapter aims to present a critical analysis of the results obtained in a European Union funded research project on the discursive representation of women in two Portuguese ‘quality’ newspapers, the Diário de Notícias and Público, between February and April 2006. My objective is to draw attention to how Portuguese media discourse conceptualizes the ‘feminine’ as the subject and object of texts. I will concentrate on the framing of issues pertinent to feminism within a news agenda-setting context that draws attention to topical issues usually ostracized from the front pages of the press. In this manner, I propose to establish a link between the discourse of feminist theory and the representation of women in the Portuguese mainstream press, inquiring into the degree to which these media texts have been influenced by either liberal or radical feminisms.

The debate over the public and the private has been greatly expounded on by both liberal and radical feminists. Although the dichotomy between them has opened up to include discussions with socialist as well as postmodern feminists, I am here essentially concerned with the influence of liberal and radical feminism on the way in which the popular imagination has come to understand the concepts of public and private spheres.

Liberal feminism has traditionally placed the emphasis on ideals such as emancipation and individual autonomy as aiding in the promotion of the socio-economic rights of women. Radical feminism, on the other hand, posits a singular feminist essence against a patriarchal universality. The term ‘radical’ in radical feminism connotes ‘going to the root’ of feminism. This root is associated with patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in the case of liberal feminism). Radical feminism bases itself on a

dichotomical logic of domination/oppression, exploring issues related to both the ‘place’

occupied by women in a production system ruled by patriarchal relationships and the reproduction of these in the ideological domain of daily life (Strinati, 1995: 197–198).

The existing inequality in social relationships of production and reproduction is revealed, according to Susanne Mackenzie (1989: 56), in the dichotomy that equates production with masculinity and reproduction with femininity. By celebrating a feminine universal essence, radical feminism has chosen the concept of reproduction as a symbol of women’s universalism, investing it with a positive connotation.

Thus, while liberal feminism has privileged a discourse on ‘rights and rules’ that regulates interaction through criteria of justice within the public sphere, radical feminism has attempted to politicize personal issues, drawing attention to the public relevance of issues allegedly pertaining to the private sphere. By questioning the privacy of personal issues, radical feminism interrogates the boundaries of strictly delimited public and private domains. Because the media’s agenda-setting function contributes to what is publicly thought of as being relevant in any society, this research project seeks to investigate how feminine identity is constructed by the press as a matter of public relevance. The conceptual frameworks of liberal and radical feminisms will help us to delineate a typology which indicates how public and private have come to be understood within academia. This will then allow us to verify whether or not the press texts analysed reflect in any way the perceptions of public and private articulated by these two currents of feminist theory.

Contextualizing the public and the private

Various feminist theorists (Fraser, 1990; Felski, 1989; Benhabib, 1992) take issue with the universality posited by the Habermasian conception of the public sphere, defined as a ‘realm of social life’ open to all in which individuals come together to discuss political issues relevant to the ‘common good’ (1989). They focus on the social exclusions which, allegedly, influence the deliberative processes within the official public sphere. The object of analysis thus becomes the activity of participants in counter-public spheres rather than that of participants in an official public sphere. Because the feminist counter-public sphere is founded on the specificity of a female identity, it distances itself from Habermas’s project in that the will towards emancipation is orientated towards the assertion of particularity in relation to issues of ‘gender, race, ethnicity, age and sexual preference’ (Felski, 1989).

Moreover, it critiques a strict dichotomy between public and private realms, drawing attention to the fact that the public and private are intertwined (MacDonald, 1995).

However, the feminist counter-public sphere can also be read as being premised on the idea of universality as a result of presupposing the universal character of gender oppression. In privileging the latter, the feminist counter-public sphere is often accused of marginalizing struggles based on other exclusions, namely those of race and class.

Bell hooks, for example, states that from its onset, working-class women associated the feminist movement with a comfortable, ‘upper middle-class’ liberal feminist hegemony, centred on romantic issues of freedom and equality (1989: 23–24).

McLaughlin (1993: 614), however, claims that feminist media studies should recuperate the concept of the traditional public sphere, going beyond ‘the tendency to focus on internal, oppositional identity at the expense of a consideration of the media’s role in hindering the establishment of representative space necessary for democracy in late capitalism’. Seyla Benhabib (1992: 52) has also defended the Habermasian ideal of communicative rationality, holding up dialogical consensus as a form of overcoming disagreements between factions through the ‘capacity for reversing perspectives’.

The capacity of the media to effectively provide a truly representative space for the exercise of participatory citizenship is linked to the degree to which it promotes dialogue and debate concerning issues deemed as publically relevant. The theory of agenda-setting, which can be traced back to McCombs and Shaw (1972), draws attention to the fact that the news media exert influence on issue salience: in other words, the more any particular issue is covered by the media, the greater importance attributed to it by media consumers. This interconnection between media and public agendas continues to resonate today, particularly among those who believe that the media constitute a sphere of public debate through which citizens gain political visibility and recognition.

Content analyses which focus on the representation of women in the media have traditionally operated within the liberal feminist perspective, concentrating on the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of women (Tuchman, 1995 [1978]: 406–407). A logic of sameness between male and female rationality provided the basis for women’s claim to equality: ‘since women are as rational as men, society carries a duty to give its female citizens equal opportunity to take part in social organisation’ (Gambaudo, 2007: 94). However, women’s greater visibility in the public arena leads to a distancing from the liberal focus on ‘sameness’ and equality.

Instead of placing emphasis on women’s capacity to assimilate characteristics associated with masculinity, such as rationality, proactivity and responsibility (Gambaudo, 2007; 94–95)—

traits that allegedly caused women to judge themselves from a male perspective—radical feminism foregrounded women’s right to difference. Radical feminism thus drew attention to the fact that liberal feminism imposed a masculine model on women’s recognition in the public sphere, outside of which they remained invisible.

Methodology

Despite often being criticized for overly foregrounding the denotative aspects of texts, feminist content analyses are valuable since they draw attention to gendered constructions through the study of media or literary texts. Central to any content

Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press

analysis is the elaboration of a typology of categories which conceptually define the object of study: one or more categories are attributed to each text unit so that the researcher may quantify the frequency of those classifications (Wodak, 2000: 58, 229, 231).

By creating polar oppositions within each category of a typology which defines liberal and radical feminisms, we attempted to cover the largest number of alternatives possible for each category. Methodologically, this procedure drew inspiration from the Saussurean presupposition (Wodak, 2000: 115) that concepts may only be defined negatively against each other: a concept may be more accurately defined by drawing attention to what it is not, rather than by specifying what it actually is. This typology, which contemplates categories that define liberal¹ and radical² feminisms, served as the basis for the coding of text units drawn from two newspapers, the Diário de Notícias and Público respectively, so as to assess the representativity of those very categories.³ The Diário de Notícias and Público were selected as quality papers due to habitually being used as benchmarks when assessing the eminence of other Portuguese newspapers. For the sake of optimization of resources, analysis was restricted to the first week of February, the second week of March and the third week of April 2006.

Subsequent to the conclusion of this content analysis, I proceeded to complement it with a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the coded text units. My objective was to focus on the contradictions between explicit and implicit messages, adopting CDA to point to the ambivalence of meanings that contribute to discursively perpetuating an ideologically conditioned view of the world. If at a manifest level there may be adherence to feminist ideals in the press, this apparent celebration is often contradicted by other elements at a more latent level.

Fairclough claims that ‘meaning-making depends upon not only what is explicit in a text but also what is implicit—what is assumed’ (2003: 11). This assertion brings to mind Althusser’s concept of symptomatic reading (1970), which can be defined as a ‘double reading’: first, one reads the manifest text; afterwards, one focuses on the distortions, silences, absences and interruptions of the manifest text so as to produce the latent text. From Fairclough’s socio-cultural perspective, latent meanings reflect unconscious, commonsense assumptions that are intertextual to the extent that they build a bridge between social context and text (2003: 17).

For Van Dijk, the ‘aim of CDA is to critically analyse the details of discursive domination…by specific elite authors, and in specific contexts’ (2008: 821). In effect, news reporting which purposefully ignores the negative actions of influential social agents is ethically reprehensible, because it serves the purpose of ‘implementing locally the overall ideological discourse strategy of positive self-presentation of in-groups’ defined against a negative presentation of the out-group (Van Dijk, 2006).

Content analysis results

A comparison of the overall frequencies of the categories inherent in the typology defining liberal and radical feminisms for the Diário de Notícias and Público newspapers during the three months studied yielded the results visible in Table 1.

The categories which achieve a particularly high rating in any one of the three months analysed, in comparison with the frequencies obtained for the same category during the other two months of the time-frame of our project, are: homosexuality, transsexuality and maternity. Charts 1, 2 and 3 demonstrate the frequency rates for these categories. In February, homosexuality in both newspapers scored a higher frequency rate than normal due to the possibility of lesbian marriage being on the agenda. Despite ranking low in absolute terms, transsexuality was given more coverage by both papers in March. This came about because of the abuse and death of a Brazilian transvestite, Gisberta, at the hands of a group of adolescent boys. Maternity was pervasive in the news during April due to the Portuguese Socialist Government’s decision to close a number of maternity wards throughout the country, with the aim of concentrating services in larger hospitals so as to maximize efficiency.

Critical discourse analysis of topical issues Homosexuality in Diário de Notícias

When two lesbians attempted to marry on 1 February 2006 at Lisbon’s Seventh Registry Office, they received a great deal of media attention, most notably from the Diário de Notícias. The issue I would like to explore here, on the basis of Van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis (2005), is that of the type of ‘in-group’ that the Diário de Notícias wished to appeal to in its coverage of this event. If, on the one hand, the news features of this paper appear to empathize with the lesbians’ cause, on the other hand, a subtle mechanism of censorship manifests itself.

Teresa Pires and Helena Paixão are first depicted as the active agents of an attempt to legitimate their ‘love’ before the whole of society. Emphasis is placed on their fairy-tale like ‘dream’ of marriage, an aspiration to ‘recognition and dignification’ that would place these two lesbians on a par with the majority of the population. Such predicates underscore their difference from the ‘in-group’ for whom marriage is an unfashionable institution.

The women are represented as having a mind of their own and as openly defying society’s conventional social codes. However, they are simultaneously regarded as enjoying ‘this moment of self-exhibition, fame and glory in a life that has until now been marked by rejection and persecution’ (Câncio, 2006a). We are told that a gardener turned his hose on the two women because they dared to walk down a street

hand-in-Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press

Table 1: Global averages for the most frequent categories

*Shaded areas represent the highest percentages within each category.

Chart 1: Homosexuality

Chart 2: Transexuality

Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press

hand. This example connotes lesbianism as offensive to the masculine psyche, which cannot accept the idea of the ‘uselessness’ and ‘powerlessness’ of a hose, a hose that then must be turned on the two women in a vengeful act of masculine affirmation.

Both have collected, throughout their lives, ‘insults, humiliations, betrayals and abandonments’, leading them to leave Lisbon and seek refuge in a more tranquil town.

The predicates used to depict their lives until this moment of media frenzy point to victimhood: whereas they were once visible ‘victims’, a target to be pointed at by the ‘in-group’, they are now visible ‘agents’, attaining the dignity they crave through a short-lived media infatuation with two women desperate for fame.

Homosexuality in Público

While the 1 February edition of the Diário de Notícias dedicated its first two pages to news features on Teresa and Helena’s attempt to marry, Público’s first two pages for that same day were dedicated to the foreseeable success of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain at the forthcoming Oscars’ ceremony. The film, which narrates the romantic entanglement of two gay cowboys in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, is hailed as breaking the Chart 3: Maternity

film industry’s conventional codes, and broaching a ‘difficult and controversial’ theme (Siza, 2006a). Because the topic of lesbian marriage can be assessed along similar lines, it is better introduced, according to Público’s logic, by an international film agenda that is the target of a certain elite cultural dialogue. Público’s discourse on culture posits a ‘self’

moulded in the best tradition of Western liberal values, namely freedom and tolerance.

Teresa and Lena are scantily referred to in the main news feature dating from 1 February (Branco, 2006b). In fact, they only briefly appear as subjects in the first paragraph of the article, when we are told that they will try to marry in Lisbon’s Seventh Registry Office.

Their agency is soon colonized by that of a petition in favour of gay marriage that ‘counts MPs amongst its subscribers’. From then on, the discourse is completely centred on the positions that political parties have on the issue, namely whether or not they intend to defend an alteration of the Civil Code in Parliament.

Transsexuality in Diário de Notícias

Transsexuality, a theme that is usually absent from the Diário de Notícias’s pages, became conspicuous for a brief moment when a Brazilian transvestite, Gisberta, was tortured and killed by a group of boys aged between eleven and sixteen who were living in a Catholic correctional home. The focus on the incident was very much juridical, centering on the condemnation of the youngsters.

The first article on Gisberta’s death alludes extensively to ‘habeas corpus’, without once defining what this legal term means to the ordinary citizen. The descriptions of the punitory measures inflicted on the minors are intricate, ranging from internment in correctional centres to preventive imprisonment in the case of the sixteen year old. Gisberta, who is notoriously absent from the text after making a brief appearance in the lead, resurfaces in the last phrase as a passive subject who will be remembered at a vigil held that very evening. Emphasis on the condemnatory measures to which the minors will be subjected foregrounds the difference between the ‘civilized’ conduct of the readers’ ‘in-group’ and the brutal intolerance of difference on the part of the young ruffians. A moral consensus is articulated around the fact that deviant behaviour must be properly punished.

Transsexuality in Público

Despite also concentrating on the punitive measures inflicted upon the minors, Público appears to be particularly interested in whether or not Gisberta died by drowning. The title ‘Exams confirm that gisberta died by drowning’ (Laranjo, 2006d) verifies that Gisberta was indeed a victim of homicide, having been thrown into a well while still alive, and was not ‘simply’ a victim of a corporeal offence. The insinuation, camouflaged by juridical terminology, is that the difference between the two alternatives is significant, as if a ‘corporeal offence’ were indeed something transvestites might be moderately used to.

The issue of whether or not the youngsters involved in the crime were conscious of Gisberta being alive before throwing her into the well is allegedly fundamental to

Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press

the State Prosecution Service. Público places itself in the latter’s role, only to shroud its concern over the ‘morality’ of the youngsters beneath a denotative interest in the juridical mechanisms of the process. ‘Morality’ is something that Público wishes to refrain from exercising on any explicit level, for it goes against the leftist ‘urban chique’ of the ‘in-group’ it wishes to appeal to.

Maternity in Diário de Notícias

Unlike Público, which gives extensive coverage on 16 April to the closure of a series of maternity wards by the Portuguese government, the Diário de Notícias remains curiously silent on the issue. However, despite not pronouncing a word on the topic during that entire week—ranging from 15–21 April—which may be indicative of an internal agenda that remains indifferent to external politics, the focus on maternity appears to have been ‘transferred’ to other health issues linked thereto, namely those of infertility and congenital foetal abnormalities.

The Diário de Notícias ran two news features on these topics under the titles ‘Social Pressure Affects Infertile Couples in the Cradle of the Nation’ (Silva, 2006b), alluding to the city of Guimarães as the residence of the first king of Portugal, and ‘Foetal Anomalies in Amarante County’ (Silva, 2006c). The first feature, which bases itself on the results of a study carried out by two researchers, points to social pressure on infertile couples as being particularly intense in Guimarães, due to both traditional family structures and a setting that is not quite urban.

The second feature focuses on the proportionately higher rate of congenital foetal

The second feature focuses on the proportionately higher rate of congenital foetal