Identidades infantis de gênero na publicidade: o que ensinam as propagandas da TV

Abstract

We live today under cultural settings of a society marked by technology, media and consumption. Those settings - made possible mainly by the combination of media and consumption - emerge consistent subjects with the new socio-cultural conditions and, therefore, there are new ways of being a child and living childhood, since childhood is a social construction and children are cultural, social and historical subjects. Therefore, as they are born and grow today, children, at least the vast majority, already enter the contemporary world surrounded by a range of marketing investments and by the production of an infinity cultural media articles destined to profit from child public. Among them, television advertisements that inquires the consumption and act as cultural pedagogies, operating as representation mechanisms, subjectifying and forming children gender identities. On this track of thought, this dissertation has as object of study the representations of children's gender identities in Brazilian broadcast television advertisements and its possible implications for the production of certain kinds of meaning in the lives of children from a Municipal Center of Children Education in Natal-RN. This study aimed to highlight, analyze and discuss how discourses and representations of masculinity and femininity conveyed in these advertisements operate for the production of children's gender identities in the context of a Municipal Center of Children Education in Natal / RN. The analysis focused on a set of eight advertisements - shown on broadcast TV and inventoried at empirical research, from March to June 2015 - and on children´s understanding in regard to the ways of being a boy and girl represented in them, transmitted in their speeches and in their practices, observed and recorded during the research in the school context of a Municipal Center of Children Education in the city of Natal/RN. Therefore, were taken as theoretical and methodological reference, the lenses of Cultural Studies in Education, in its post- structuralist side, as well as some approaches of Gender Studies - especially those about gender issues, media, consumption and education - such as conceptual tools highlighted by Michel Foucault and inspired in Foucault's speech analysis. In addition, was used a bricolage of methodological strategies from the relationship between ethnographic based approaches, making use of observation tools, record in field diary, photographs and video recordings of children's daily lives; focus group , guiding them through the advertisements readings and the Foucault-inspired speech analysis to understand the implications of gender discourse in advertisements, and on children and those involved with their education (management team, teachers and responsible) statements and behavior. From the current analysis, the results indicate, among other findings, the understanding that with the idea of consumption for happiness, the Brazilian television advertising market conveys strongly different representations and, therefore, stereotypical regulation about places to occupied or not, and the roles and functions to be exercised by men/boys and women/girls instead of their gender, in a hierarchical manner. These representations also establish and operate in the construction of children´s understanding about embellishment practices of body and soul, forged by techniques that also reinforce stereotypes and guide the dissolution of boundaries between generations, creating a female childhood increasingly adult and eroticized. They also showed up from the analyzes, how childhood in the northeast has had its consumption desires influenced by advertisements, emphasizing very specific representations of southeastern and southern regions, which spreads in Brazil, not only specific and selected representations of gender, but also represent and form (conform) ways of being boy and girl very specific of these regions, above the others, placing the northeastern children in a process called childhood “sudestinação” (impose southeastern aspects). All this, of course, between sets of power relations and market interests.