Description
Nowadays, the concepts of masculine and feminine, previously taken as natural and legitimate, have been increasingly contested. With the Internet, the audience is becoming more critical and participative. Consumers have the opportunity to complain and even boycott the brands when they do not feel represented or resent the advertisements. In this context, advertising has been seeking to approach topics such as transexuality, homoaffective relationships, objectification of women's bodies and female empowerment. However, not all advertisers have adapted to the new demands of the social scenario and, in Brazil, we have had recent cases of advertisements directed to the female public, which were considered sexist and prejudiced. Thus, in order to study the female representation in brazilian advertising and the power relations between men and women in Brazil, it was analyzed brazilian advertising campaigns from the last five years, which have women as a target. For this purpose, we used as theoretical and methodological basis the Critical Discourse Analysis and the Critical Genre Analysis, because they are approaches that allow us to combine several theoretical frameworks and analyze our object of study in order to consider both its formal and linguistic aspects as well as its ideological and conceptual aspects, focusing also on the notion of textual genre, still little explored in the study of publicity. Our research corpus is composed of advertising pieces that have been reported to CONAR (Conselho Nacional de Autorregulamentação Publicitária) or accused of reproducing a sexist discourse. We analyzed three advertising cases published in Brazil between 2015 and 2017, the campaign "Homens que amamos", by Risqué, "#Sem Mimimi", by Novalfem and the release of Proibida Puro Malte Rosa Vermelha - Mulher. The results indicate that, although the audience's critical awareness and interest in the subject have increased, the appeal to gender stereotypes is still recurrent in Brazilian advertising, which indicates that the unequal division between men and women continues to be hegemonic in our society.