Global Journal of Human Social Science, G: Linguistics and Education, Volume 23 Issue 8

Bolsonaro government, which formally began in January 2019, when the issue was extremely tense. That said, the next section provides a brief approach to how the media field is configured in Brazil, with emphasis on the vehicle that is the focus of this investigation to support the analysis and discussion of the data. II. T he M edia F ield in B razil The media emerge as important agents in the field of representations, directly influencing the dynamics of society's functioning. The means of communication are powerful producers and mediators of discourse, they maintain and reproduce social conventions about masculinity, femininity, sexual desire, ethnicity, class, generation, etc. The media acts, therefore, as a co-author of the discourse that produces ways of life that, in turn, reproduce the hegemonic normative logic. Alzira Alves de Abreu recalls numerous studies use the press as a source of information, but that “there is a lack of analyzes on the influence it exerted on the course of events” (ABREU, 2017, p. 220). In Brazil, the media is commanded by large communication groups that concentrate the production of the maximum part of the information consumed by Brazilians, which in concrete terms is equivalent to saying that five families control half of the 50 vehicles with the highest audience. To get an idea of the impact of this, a survey carried out by the Media Ownership Monitor (MOM) 1 It is important to note that in 2016, the pornography site RedTube carried out research without , Brazil is in 102nd place on a list of 180 countries in the 2018 Global Press Freedom Index. According to this research, in addition to the high concentration of audience, the Brazilian media reality is excessively dependent on sponsors, whether public institutions, private companies, or even religious institutions; as well as high geographic concentration, that is, most of the command of information and media networks is in the Southeast region and Brasília. Thus, we can conclude that editorial decisions, agenda priorities, and representations of images and everyday life present in the media, in short, all the discourse produced, is mostly marked by the interests of its maintainers, a fact that culminates in the construction and reproduction of a specific discursive logic, compatible with the socio-political context in which it operates. Such logic and discourses produced do not escape standardization when applied to gender issues. Everything that does not fit the established pattern parameterized by market logic and capital tends to be marginalized. 1 MOM was created and implemented by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an international organization whose aim is to defend human rights, in particular freedom of the press and the right to inform and be informed anywhere in the world. revealing specific numbers but stating that Brazilians look for 89% more pornographic content from transsexuals when compared to other countries in the world that access the site. In this same survey, the pornography website says that the term “Shemale”, used to search for videos with trans people, is the fourth most searched topic by Brazilians, the search for trans pornographic content increases when the search adds up regional vocabularies such: transvestite and Brazilian shemale. It is worth noting that in the world ranking, the same search term occupies the ninth place. Currently, Brazil is one of the most intolerant countries with transvestites and transsexuals in the world, being the first in the list of deaths and murders of these people, according to the survey carried out by Transgender Europe (TGEu), between October 1, 2017, and September 30, 2018. According to the same data, between 2017 and 2018, 369 homicides of transsexuals, transvestites, and non-binary individuals were recorded. These numbers grow every year, the life expectancy of these people drops to 35 years old while the national average is 75 years old. We believe that the normative logic produced in the media discourse strengthens these data and solidifies the configuration of harsh reality by creating statements that undermine these subjects, as detailed below. III. T he F olha de S ão P aulo The Folha de S. Paulo was founded in 1921 and belongs to the Frias's family – one of those who control more than half of the vehicles with the highest audience in the country –, which also owns the newspaper Agora São Paulo, the classifieds Alô Negócios and the advertising agency Folha Press news, in addition to UOL, one of the most accessed portals in Brazil, and the Data Folha research institute. The Folha de S. Paulo was chosen for being the largest in digital circulation and the third in printed format in Brazil, according to data audited by the Instituto Verificador de Circulação (IVC). Its audience in the first decades of circulation was concentrated in the State of São Paulo. With the digitization of content, readers spread throughout the national territory and even outside the country. Even so, more than 70% of Folha de S. Paulo consumers belong to the upper class and upper middle class according to the newspaper's survey. IV. D ata and A nalysis To facilitate the perception of how journalistic texts about transvestites and transsexuals are distributed in Folha de S. Paulo, we created Data table I . In it, we display horizontally the number of texts found by time-lapse (the distribution of years does not follow a regularity, as seen ahead) and, vertically, the editorship. Volume XXIII Issue VIII Version I 10 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 G © 2023 Global Journals Discursive Walls: Mapping Trans Coverage through Folha de S. Paulo between 1960 and 2017