"Não é brincadeira de bicha": um estudo sobre representações de homossexuais no jornal Lampião da Esquina

Abstract

In this research, we seek to study the processes of representation of homosexual subjects in Lampião da Esquina, the first admittedly gay Brazilian newspaper that circulated between 1978 and 1981, a period of relaxation of the censorship years of the military regime that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. As a theoretical basis, we use the Critical Discourse Analysis (ADC) proposed by Fairclough (2001), which assumes that all discursive analysis takes place at three different levels: a) analysis of social practice, b) analysis of discursive practice and c) analysis of textual practice. Thus, understanding that language and society go hand in hand, our goal was to understand how the linguistic designation “faggot”, historically used to refer to homosexuals in an insulting way, now takes on another meaning in a scenario of political openness. For ADC, language is considered a social practice loaded with ideological values, involving social actors, a notion presented by Van Leeuwen (1997), whose analysis is able to identify how subjects can be included or excluded from discourses through different processes. For the methodology, we adopted the principles of the ADC on the above levels of analysis, also understanding that the research has a qualitative bias, allowing the researcher an approximation with the reality to be investigated. For the constitution of the corpus of analysis, we selected, with the searcher, nine texts in which it was possible to identify the word “faggot” in its body or title. Through this clipping, therefore, it was possible to realize that Lampião da Esquina was able to construct other meanings for the word analyzed here, in a movement of resignification from the evocation of homophobic discourses.