Media discourse and critical literacy
a gender-based perspective on reborn dolls and toy cars
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14393/DLv20a2026-27Keywords:
Critical literacy, Inferential operations, Media discourse, NewsAbstract
Media discourse plays a central role in shaping and sustaining social representations that, under the guise of neutrality, reproduces historical asymmetries. This study aims to analyze, from the perspective of critical literacy, how headlines and leads of journalistic texts construct opposing representations of collecting practices. To this end, six widely circulated national news articles were examined: three focusing on women who own reborn dolls and three on men who collect toy cars. The research adopts a qualitative approach, grounded in the principles of critical literacy (Arruda, 2023), particularly, the principle of the presence of truth, articulated with Marcuschi’s (2008) framework of inferential operations and supported by the theoretical contributions of Bourdieu (1989), Fairclough (2001), Amossy (2020), Cavalcante et al. (2020), and hooks (2018, 2020). The findings indicate that, through lexical and structural choices, journalistic discourse naturalizes the pathologization and disqualification of women’s practices, while legitimizing men’s practices as rational, technical, and successful. We conclude that such discursive mechanisms reinforce gender hierarchies and highlight the importance of critical reading to denaturalize these meanings and to transgress toward more ethical, equitable, and transformative discursive practices.
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