O ENVELHECER FEMININO EM DISCURSO NA MÍDIA DIGITAL: Imaginários, memória e desigualdades

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the modes through which meanings about Brazilian female old age are constituted in articulation with beauty discourses circulating in digital media. Grounded in Materialist Discourse Analysis, the study investigates the social effects produced and reproduced regarding women's aging through discursive formations that stabilize and shift around hegemonic beauty standards within the Brazilian media context. In this scenario, the study examines how such aesthetic references contribute to legitimizing a socially valued body associated with youth, socially appropriate appearance, and symbolic visibility. The research corpus consists of discursive excerpts collected through screenshots of news articles, posts, and testimonials published about female old age. The analysis is organized around the following materialities: the Statute of the Elderly; official documents from the World Health Organization (WHO); and texts circulating in digital media, such as journalistic websites and blogs, interviews, documentaries available on streaming platforms, as well as testimonials, trends, digital filters, and memes shared on the social media platform Instagram. In light of the notions of discourse, ideology, discursive formations, interdiscourse, and discursive memory, as proposed by Pêcheux (1975; 1983; 1999) and Orlandi (1986; 1999; 2009; 2015), as well as the concept of the place of enunciation developed by Zoppi-Fontana (1999; 2017), the study analyzes how elderly women are interpellated by different discourses that produce distinct subject positions and regulate forms of visibility, control, and invisibility in the social space. In dialogue with media studies, particularly the works of Sampaio (2025) and Dela-Silva (2022), with the concept of the digital proposed by Dias (2016; 2017; 2018), and with reflections on the meanings of care, female aging is understood as a contradictory discursive process shaped by patriarchal, capitalist, and racialized rationalities that organize contemporary ways of signifying female old age.