Paradoxical states of the orders of seeing and saying: the identity of the Brazilian woman identity in an institutional advertisement in tribute to the international women’s day

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the institutional advertisement of Caixa Econômica Federal in tribute to the International Women’s Day, aired during 2010. Based on fundamentals of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in dialogue with some notions of the so-called “French” Discourse Analysis as well as with the studies of the grammar of visual design, we aim to demonstrate the perpetuation in this materiality of a marginalized identity for the Brazilian woman, based on what we call ‘paradoxical states of orders of seeing and saying’. Considering the direct relation between textual materiality, in its multimodal composition, and the social relations from which it derives, we point out the contradiction of paying tribute, in the verbal level, and paying tribute, in the imagistic level. The inflection of materiality over the meanings reveals the permanence, even if latent, of social determinations over language practices from and in which Brazilian woman’s identity is constructed.