O que quer uma mulher segundo o discurso da revista feminina

Abstract

Female magazines emerge as an official knowledge that "objectively and impartially" produces an effect of transparency of meaning and truth about woman. According to the Discourse Analysis proposed by Pêcheux-DA (the theoretical-methodological referential adopted by this research), this erasing of the constitution process of the meaning leads the subject to the recognition of itself and to the occupation of the place where it belongs in the discourse. In this perspective, the subject is a discursive position. Interpellated by the ideology, the subject creates meaning. That occurs because there is a need of sedimentation of sense so that it originates a logically stable universe. However, Freud at the end of his work asks himself "what does the woman want", while Lacan, in his return to the Freudian work, proposes his provocative formula "the woman does not exist". This dissertation aims to analyze female magazines extracts from different periods (from 1917 to 2007) to propose how these magazines build meanings about what is a woman and what a woman wants, under the discourse production conditions. Because the DA concerns the historical determination of the signification processes, it is important to return to the feminism history and to academic feminist's texts, both seen here as an interdiscourse present in the discourse of female magazines. While the Psychoanalysis tries to investigate how The woman is formed, female magazines are concerned with describing the woman and her behavior, sedimenting and naturalizing meanings and originating a norm of identification. The Psychoanalysis considers The woman as a subject position in front of the joy and the submission of the phallic logic (not-whole), so the woman would not form a rule as the man, they could only be counted one by one. On the other hand, the female magazines build these meanings by using discursive generics (encapsulated formulas that codify values and beliefs), naturalizing the meanings assigned to the woman and her activities. We concluded that both the feminist movement, in order to promote changes and brakages of all kinds (moral, religious, juridical), and the female magazines, different from the Psychoanalysis, propose a positivity of an universal subject named woman.