The Women’s Spring: Recitation of Myths and Memory Moves on Magazine Covers

Abstract

This article presents a discursive analysis of Época and Istoé magazine covers published in November 2015, an effervescent period of women’s protests in major Brazilian cities’ streets. We propose understanding how these media discourses constitute the Women’s Spring event in the correlation between images and captions, producing significance about what is seen and what is read. We establish the theoretical foundation on the interlocution between the concept of myth developed by Roland Barthes’ Semiology and postulates of French Discourse Analysis about the image as a social memory operator because the media discourses challenge forms, signification, and history. The analysis demonstrates that the magazine covers present connotation procedures that move significants, atributting then historical meanings. Thus, the magazine covers recite myths such as the “youth who dreams about revolution” and activate, by analogy and association to previous images, memory trajectories that date back to the event of Arab Spring.

Keywords:
Discourse; Semiology; Media; Feminism