O empoderamento feminino na publicidade brasileira: uma investigação crítica dos discursos feministas nas práticas midiáticas contemporâneas

Abstract

In contemporary society there is a growing presence of media representations about female empowerment, films, TV series and advertising campaigns have appropriated the concept, often improperly, emptying its political and social function. In this research we will seek to investigate how advertisements aimed at the female audience represent empowerment. We will look at the femevertising marketing strategy – feminist advertising – used to rhetorically build female empowerment within advertisements aimed at women, focusing on the discursive processes that represent this empowerment and how it contributes or not to feminist activism. The chosen corpus are advertising campaigns of brands that present themselves as supporters of the feminist movement, basing their advertising pieces on a discursive narrative that promotes the empowerment of women and are allied to a feminist vision. Five advertising pieces of the brands were selected, i) L'oreal Paris, ii) O Boticário, iii) Avon, iv) Dove and v) Salon Line. Each campaign was described in a multimodal transcription model that contemplates the various semioses present in each commercial. When we choose to analyze advertising campaigns, we need to be clear about the procedures involving video analysis. We realized, then, that the analysis should be broad and investigative, in the sense that we need to observe the entire construction of the commercial, since it makes several semiotic resources available: sounds, images and verbal texts. To do so, we assume the theoretical-methodological model provided by Grammar of Visual Design, by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), in which the authors develop an analysis model that makes it possible to observe how all the semiotic resources present in a text jointly construct social meanings. In addition to basing ourselves on the assumptions of Norman Fairclough (1989; 1995; 2001; 2003) on Critical Discourse Studies. We identified with the results of this research that the advertisements presented only show the transformation of something intangible, such as feminist thought, into a commodity condition, without deepening and aligning with women's political struggle for empowerment, because although feminist advertising brings a Differentiated approach from other times, its main focus is reaching market niches. The strategies are not designed to promote ruptures or changes, but to adapt to women who have purchasing power and freedom of choice, as we can see in the analyzes carried out.