Da cozinha à lavanderia: a propaganda como dispositivo de captura dos corpos femininos

Abstract

The XIXth century was marked by great social transformations that resulted in several formative characteristics of the current society. The echoes of revolutionary France collaborated to organize a public sphere as a distinct space from the private sphere where power relations are identified that determine roles to be played by men and women. According to this view, men are actors in the public life, while the actuation in the private space of the home is destined for women. This socially constructed outlook has become allied to other discourses of the same tenor, and has been erected in such a way as to determine a "natural destiny" for women: to be a wife, a mother, and a housewife. This discourse had great repercussion in the Brazil of the XXth century, since it was supported by the rise of capitalist bourgeois society that was formed under the ideal of modernity. The Brazilian industrial development of the "Golden Years" - a period that refers to the 1950s and 1960s – fostered even more this discourse due to the entry of a vast range of utilities and home appliances into the market. Faced with this, the press seemed an important vehicle of perpetuation for this discourse. The present research, with this horizon of perspective, seeks to observe the way in which the advertisements of home appliances published in the magazine "O Cruzeiro" - the greatest Brazilian weekly in the XXth century - during the "Golden Years", reaffirmed the gender roles imposed on women through the reproduction of the discourse that affirmed a place and a specific function to them. So that, the discussion will involve the formative aspects of the discourse that opposes the public and private social spheres, the emergence of the press in Brazil and how it has become a vehicle of diffusion and maintenance of this ideal and, especially, the analysis of the advertisements that affirm the gender roles imposed by the two spheres.