A "ideologia de gênero" em artigos de opinião: um estudo à luz da Teoria da Estrutura Retórica e da Linguística Textual

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been, in Brazil, a constant intensification of the discussions in politics and related areas, such as health and education. One of these intensifications revolves around the presence of gender and sexuality studies explicitly in ideologia de gênero) as a name given by conservative groups in our society to the inclusion of these discussions in Brazilian schools, with a negative and threatening connotation to conservative values, both religious and moral. Therefore, this topic has appeared in the most diverse of the situations, ranging from informal conversations to social and journalistic media. In this last field, we have seen the production of opinion articles on the topic, which convey opinions that either endorse the so-called concept of can add up to the discussion on the topic, which already counts with research in other areas such as Law and Social Sciences, this study aims at analyzing the rhetorical connection between these structures and the overview on this term in Brazil. For that, we have carried out our research under the light of the theoretical frameworks of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and of the studies on textual macrostructures postulated by Teun A. van Dijk, which observe the hierarchy between text spans locally and globally, as well as the semantic and pragmatic relations that hold between these observing the producer-text-reader and context relations. Results point to the existence of a higher number of what is called, in RST, presentational relations in the texts that endorse the term, in contrast with a higher number of subject matter relations in the text that refuse it, which confirms the hypothesis proposed by us. This suggests an underlying intention of the producers of texts from the first group to engage the reader into acting against the inclusion of gender and sexuality studies in schools, which drifts away from the prototypical communicative objective of opinion articles. On the other hand, text from the second group seem to deal with the topic in a more explanatory and clarifying way, leading the reader to a perception of the semantic relation between blocks of information. This has been observed mainly in global meanings, whereas, locally, the rhetorical relations between text spans seemed to concatenate in a way that helped more global relations to hold.