A construção identitária de mulheres negras em capas de revistas brasileiras e americanas: um estudo comparativo

Abstract

Nowadays, technological advances, in the information age, have imprinted decisive marks on the forms of communication, making the verbal language to be engaged with the visual language, so that texts, in digital media, started to be composed from a multimodal configuration. Based on that, in this dissertation, we propose to carry out comparative analyzes of the representations of black women in six covers of Vogue magazine, that is, the corpus will be composed of three Brazilian and three American covers. To achieve this goal, we list, as a theoretical foundation: Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), aiming at investigating linguistic materiality; the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006, 2021), for reading the semiotic landscape; and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003), through which identity representation and formation can be analyzed. For this purpose, in this qualitative-interpretative research, we followed the subsequent methodological path: at first, we applied the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions, concerning Systemic-Functional Grammar, to then analyze the multimodal composition through representational and interactive metafunctions, from the Grammar of Visual Design, and, finally, to apply the analytical tools concerning the identificational meaning, derived from Critical Discourse Analysis. The results we arrived at show that there is similarity in the representations of black women on the covers of Brazilian and American Vogue magazines, so that the publications are on the same level: they carry discourses whose core is in the valorization of black identity.