(DES) Construindo atletas olímpicas: Análise das práticas discursivas sobre mulheres atletas, no contexto das Olimpíadas de 2016

Abstract

The media and its sports coverage, more than spread information, produce knowledges and specific ways to communicate what a body is and how it is perceived by the gender and sexuality points of view. Despite the predominance of speeches that insists in operate over a binary way (male or female, homossexual or heterossexual), the media has been producing also speeches that question this binarism, giving an openness for other kinds or genders and sexualities to be understood and performed. Thinking about this - and taking over feminists and gender theories, as well as the Social Psychology of Social Constructionist basis - I looked for, in this research, to analyze the discursive practices that build the senses over the female athletes in digital production of UOL website, in the 2016 Olympics context. For 31 days I’ve registered a total of 454 articles that have as a main subject female athletes or teams. From this corpus, I discussed quantitatively how was the process of visibility and themes that approach female athletes. For the qualitative analysis, 5 articles were chosen with the theme Performance/Career; 5 with the theme behavior/relationship/sexuality; 4 articles from the special session "Quero Treinar em Paz"; and 4 in partnership with the feminist magazine Azmina. I identified, though, the repertoires and senses that circles in digital medial about the athletes in the chosen digital media, and based on the 18 articles I distinguished 3 discursive matrices that give sense to this cathegory to know: Productive Matrix, Prescriptive Matrix and Questioner Matrix. This way it was able to notice that in the media the prescriptive notions about gender and sexuality are still predominant. However, the existence of a questioner matrix points to a trend of changes in those discursive practices. About the binarisms and the bindings of gender to biological and sexual differences, those are almost not questioned. Thus, I have found to a greater extent the expansion of the notions of femininity. This glimpse of changes appears most prominently in special articles that address the issue of gender equity. And, this way, it is noted that the contributions of feminist epistemologies to the media are urgent in the search to deconstruct or at least defamiliarize the senses, repertoires and notions that circulate and build female athletes.