Where are the researches on gender in Communication? An analysis of production in Portuguese

Abstract

This article presents the analysis of scientific publications on the themes of gender and communication from the beginning of the fourth feminist wave (2013) until 2019. Therefore, this text is divided into two methodological phases. In the first one, inspired by Systematic Review Protocols, we collected data in the SciELO database and found 71 texts from different areas. We refined the results and selected 15 articles for the second phase, the qualitative Content Analysis. The results obtained in the classification demonstrate that, although the texts deal with gender issues and mention several fourth-wave themes – such as harassment, gender violence, and intersectionality –, only four have a feminist approach. The corpus references show that the authors with more representativeness and citations are Joan Scott and Judith Butler, and they make it possible to affirm that there are little interactions within some areas (Sports, Communication, and Health). Nevertheless, they show the lack of dialogue that prevails in the set of research on these themes in Portuguese.

Keywords
Gender; Communication; Feminisms; Content analysis; Theoretical frameworks

Resumo

O artigo apresenta a análise de publicações científicas com as temáticas de gênero e comunicação do início da quarta onda feminista (2013) até o ano de 2019. Dessa maneira, este trabalho se encontra dividido em duas etapas metodológicas. Na primeira etapa, inspirada nos protocolos da revisão sistemática, fizemos a coleta de dados na base SciELO e encontramos 71 textos de diversas áreas. Refinamos os resultados e selecionamos 15 artigos para a segunda fase de Análise de Conteúdo qualitativa. Os resultados obtidos na classificação demonstram que, embora os textos tratem de questões de gênero e mencionem várias temáticas da quarta onda – tais como assédio, violência de gênero e interseccionalidade –, apenas quatro têm uma abordagem feminista. As referências do corpus mostram que as autoras mais citadas e com maior representatividade são Joan Scott e Judith Butler, e que existe uma pequena interação dentro de algumas áreas (Esporte, Comunicação e Saúde). Contudo, evidenciam a falta de diálogo que prevalece no conjunto das pesquisas das temáticas em língua portuguesa.

Palavras-chave
Gênero; Comunicação; Feminismos; Análise de conteúdo; Referenciais teóricos

Resumen

El artículo presenta el análisis de publicaciones científicas que tratan temáticas de género y comunicación desde el inicio de la cuarta ola feminista (2013) hasta el año 2019. En una primera etapa, inspirada en los protocolos de la revisión sistemática, recolectamos datos de la base SciELO y encontramos 71 textos de diferentes áreas. Luego afinamos los resultados y seleccionamos 15 artículos para la segunda fase del Análisis de Contenido cualitativo. Los resultados obtenidos en la clasificación demuestran que, aunque los textos aborden cuestiones de género y mencionen varios temas de la cuarta ola como, por ejemplo, acoso, violencia de género y la interseccionalidad –, sólo cuatro de ellos tienen un enfoque feminista. Las referencias del corpus muestran que las autoras más citadas y con mayor representativas son Joan Scott y Judith Butler, y que existe una pequeña interacción dentro de algunas áreas (Deportes, Comunicación y Salud). Sin embargo, evidencian la falta de diálogo que prevalece en el conjunto de investigaciones sobre las temáticas citadas en lengua portuguesa.

Palabras clave
Género; Comunicación; Feminismos; Análisis de contenido; Marco teórico

Introduction

For centuries, women were prohibited of doing science and contributing to the production of knowledge, oppressed initially by religious and later by the scientific organizations themselves (MATOS, 2014). Historical knowledge has men as a reference, however, History and Human Sciences, by dealing with themes and social groups hitherto excluded from their interest, open space for the development of investigations about women that give rise to gender studies. Cultural history, when interested in workers, peasants, and common people, pluralizes its object of study by reaching out to women (SOIHET, 1997).

In the Social Communication area, until the early 2000s, researches on gender and feminisms were rare, even with a gradual increase on the number of publications about it in Brazil since the 1970s (SOARES, 1994; TOMAZETTI, 2019; ESCOSTEGUY, 2019). The first publications with this perspective were carried out during the second feminist wave period¹, marked by the struggle for civil rights and inspired by the book The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (2009), published in 1949. With the increase in postgraduate courses and scientific papers published in recent years, there has been growth in this research area. However, the field still lacks studies that analyze the bibliography, methods, techniques, and epistemological approaches in which gender issues in Social Communication are anchored (TOMAZETTI, 2019; ESCOSTEGUY, 2019; MASSUCHIN; TAVARES; SILVA, 2020).

While the debate on gender and feminism became popular in the United States and European countries, mainly from the 1960s onwards, during this period, Brazil experienced a dictatorial regime, and it was in this environment that the first feminist manifestations appeared, followed by the first studies on the women and gender (PINTO, 2010). In academy, after the re-democratization of the country, there was greater freedom of thought and scientific production. Even so, studies that intersect gender and communication are still marginal (ESCOSTEGUY; MESSA, 2006; TAVARES; MASSUCHIN; SOUZA, 2021).

In this sense, this article intends to contribute to partially fill the gap of a few surveys of the scientific production on gender and communication. The objective is to review the literature written in Portuguese on the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) database on the themes, to analyze their characteristics concerning the theoretical frameworks, objects and/or subjects of analysis and methodological perspectives. The defined time frame was from 2013 to 2019, considered as part of the period of the fourth feminist wave, and marked by the use of digital platforms, diversity of feminisms, intersectionality, mobilization in the form of collectives and transnational agendas, but also local ones, adapted to the reality of each group. The issues of the female body, the consubstantiality of oppression (CURIEL, 2020), forms of gender violence and women’s political participation are some of the themes emphasized (HOLLANDA, 2018; CHAMBERLAIN, 2017; PEREZ; RICOLDI, 2018; DRUMMOND, 2020).

In our search, we’ve obtained 71 results that were refined for the research areas of Communication, Women’s Studies, and Cultural Studies, resulting in 33 articles, of which 15 were selected for the qualitative Content Analysis presented in this article.

A brief state of the art of research on gender in Communication in Brazil

The first gender studies in Social Communication in Brazil are about audiovisual and printed media. These studies focus on the message, studying the production of content for and by women, with a peak in the 1970s in Latin America (ESCOSTEGUY; MESSA, 2006). From the 1980s, the focus becomes the reception, and the public (childish and feminine) was judged as passive and victim of media manipulation (CREEL, 1996). This relationship between the body and the media remained the subject of thesis and dissertations until the late 1990s. It was only from the 2000s onwards that the various media representations of the feminine became the target of publications (ESCOSTEGUY; MESSA, 2006).

We highlight two analyses on gender studies in thesis and dissertations: the research carried out by Escosteguy and Messa (2006), performed in the period from 1992 to 2002, which found 65 productions; and the one by Tomazetti (2019), who mapped the interfaces between gender studies and the thesis and dissertations defended from 1972 to 2015. As Tomazetti (2019) shows, in the analyzed period, 13,265 master’s and doctoral’ investigations were produced in Communication. Of this total number, 316 works have an interface with gender studies, which means that only 2.38% of the production in the Communication postgraduate courses dealt with gender issues (TOMAZETTI, 2020). Within this universe, as an example, investigations into Journalism present analyses of discourses, frameworks, and how the news are constructed, with the gender issue being the focus of research on women and/or feminist bias. Gender, telenovela, and serial fiction investigations are related to the identity aspects of the narratives, the plot, and their social context. Studies on masculinities are also rare (TOMAZETTI, 2020; CASADEI, 2022).

Questions about gender issues in Communication researches are more frequent in reception studies (JACKS; MENEZES; PIEDRAS, 2008; JACKS et al., 2014; JACKS et al., 2017; ESCOSTEGUY, 2008). However, surveys on publications in scientific journals in Communication dealing with gender and feminism are even rarer. One of the few works is that of Tavares, Massuchin, and Souza (2021), which analyzes the theme of 155 articles published in Qualis A1 and A2 journals in the Communication and Information areas, based on bibliographic references.

Methodology

To fulfill the objective of surveying scientific productions in Portuguese on the themes of gender and communication during the fourth feminist wave in order to analyze their characteristics, we were inspired by the protocols used in a systematic review of the literature. We made this choice because it is a way of searching the bibliography that allows avoiding biases through specific search parameters in a database, generating transparency and the possibility of replicating the research (EDUARDO; SOUZA; ANGELI, 2019). It also integrates and synthesizesg information on the selected theme presented in several studies, comparing differences and similarities of approaches. We describe below the stages of the methodological path.

For material collection, we selected the SciELO database through a search on the Web of Science platform. The reason for choosing this database was that it has open access and allows obtaining productions from the global South (South Africa, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil², Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela), and written in Portuguese (Portugal). Our work proposal aims to make the production of emerging countries visible, opposing the logic of emphasis given by the largest databases to the global North, works in English, and countries considered hegemonic in the production of science.

Initially, we searched on the Web of Science for the terms ‘Gender’ and ‘Communication’ in all databases, selecting topics as a filter (title, abstract, and keywords of the productions). It is interesting to note, in this first result, the vertiginous world growth of research on gender and communication, especially after the 2000s (Graphic 1). There are many political and social events involving feminist issues in Brazil, especially since 2013, and this context is now also addressed in the academy (DRUMMOND, 2020). The research areas with the most publications are Psychology and Behavioral Science (around 45% each), with Communication in the third position (around 26%).

Graphic 1
Scientific productions with the terms ‘Gender’ and ‘Communication’ published between 1975 and 2019 and located on the Web of Science

Due to the large volume of results found in the first search and to get closer to our objective, we made the first refinement for the time interval from 2013 to 2019. We also delimited the results for the SciELO database, for the research domain of Social Sciences, and only for articles in Portuguese, obtaining 71 results from different areas. Then, we narrowed it down to the research areas of Communication, Women’s Studies, and Cultural Studies, which resulted in 33 articles³.

Of the 33 articles, most were written by more than one author (75.76%), and productions with a single author add up to 24.24% of the total. Publications with five or more authors are mostly in the area of Health (Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, CoDAS, Cuadernos de Psicología del Deporte, Investigación y Educación en Enfermería, Revista de Nutrição and Revista de Saúde Pública), being only one of Educational Studies (Da Investigação às Práticas). Publications with one to four authors have a greater diversity of areas with representations from journals in Administration (Alcance), Health (Ciência & Coletiva Saúde, Motricidade, Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem, and Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia), Gender Studies (Ex aequo and Revista Estudos Feministas), Communication (Galáxia and Intercom: Brazilian Journal of Communication Sciences), Political Science (Opinião Pública) and Physical Education (Revista Brasileira de Educação Física e Esporte) (Graphic 2).

Graphic 2
Productions with the terms ‘Gender’ and ‘Communication’ by year and authorship

Regarding the number of publications per year, 2016 and 2017 have eight publications each, adding up to approximately half of the scientific production of the period. As Drummond (2020) reports, there are political changes and social events brought to the fore in the debate on gender and feminism in Brazil and Portugal. From June 2013, the manifestations expanded and diversified, covering many diverse themes (MENDONÇA, 2018). In 2014, President Dilma Rousseff was re-elected but suffered impeachment in 2016. In Brazil, in 2015, there were also demonstrations against Bill no. 5.069/2013, presented by Eduardo Cunha, which made it difficult for rape victims to access essential medical care and legal abortion (HOLLANDA, 2018); the SlutWalk manifestations are repeated; and the Femicide Law (no. 13.104/2015) comes into effect, which includes femicide as a heinous crime.

On the streets and social networks (one of the hallmarks of the fourth wave, online militancy), gender agendas are diverse, such as the non-hegemonic ones of LGBTQIA+⁴ causes (GOMES; SORJ, 2014). In 2017, the allegations of sexual harassment in Hollywood by the #metoo movement also triggered demonstrations in different parts of the world, including Brazil and Portugal. The other years account for the other half of the productions, in descending order: 2015 (18.18%), 2018 (12.12%), 2019 (9.09%), 2013, and 2014 (both with 6.06%).

The next step corresponded to the definition of the articles for the qualitative Content Analysis (SAMPAIO; LYCARIÃO, 2021). For this, we read the articles to identify whether they addressed the themes of Gender and Communication, and to check if their relevance and validity met our objective. The classification made individually was checked and discussed collectively. At this stage, we excluded 18 articles in which the keywords selected in the search appeared in the texts but were treated only as analysis variables. An example is the article “Online and offline political participation in the 2014 presidential elections in Salvador” (SANTANA, 2017), in which ‘Gender’ is treated as sex, and ‘Communication’ as the types of technologies or digital platforms used by people voters. Finally, we chose 15 articles as our corpus (Table 1) for the qualitative Content Analysis, which were carried out based on the available codebook.

Chart 1
Data from the articles that make up the corpus

	Title	Authors	Journal, year
1	The Feminization of Journalism from the Perspective of Gender Inequalities	Lelo	Estudos Feministas, 2019
2	Racism, Fashion and Diversity in Beauty Patterns: Iman, Somali Top Model from the 70/80s	Passos	Estudos Feministas, 2019
3	Homophobia and the Brazilian Socialists in “O Lampião da Esquina” (1978-1981)	Moretti-Pires; Tesser Júnior; Kovaleski	Estudos Feministas, 2018
4	Communication, Migration and Gender: Transnational Families, Activisms and ICT Uses	Cogo	Intercom, 2017
5	Rural Women and their Mediated Uses of ICTs: Tensions and Continuities in Gender inequalities	Escosteguy; Sifuentes; Bianchini	Intercom, 2017
6	Impacts of a Documentary on the Daily Lives of Mothers and Children with Disabilities: an Analysis of Cine Debates	Cavalcante et al.	Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, 2016
7	Can Institutional Videos Contribute Towards the Debate on How to Deal with Domestic Violence Against Children?	So et al.	Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, 2016
8	Limits and Possibilities of an Online Game for Building Adolescents’ Knowledge of Sexuality	Oliveira et al.	Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, 2016
9	Women in Power: Aspects of Women’s Speeches in Electoral Campaigns	Panke; Iasulaitis	Opinião Pública, 2016
10	Discourse about Brazilian Team Present in the Folha de S.Paulo During the Year of Realization of the “Germany World Cup”	Gabriel; Freitas Júnior	Rev. Bras. Educ. Física e Esporte, 2016
11	Feminism, Motherhood, and the Media - Historically Close Relations in Review	Tomaz	Galáxia, 2015
12	The Performance Art That Became Octopus: Floating in the Waters of Arts in Hybrid and Unintelligible Corporalities	Melo; Ribeiro	Estudos Feministas, 2015
13	Revelations of Brazilian Sports Photographers about Gender Relations	Pereira; Pontes; Ribeiro	Motricidade, 2015
14	Speak, Lola, Speak: Discursive Strategies of a Feminist Blog	Rizzotto	Galáxia, 2014
15	Between Public and Private: Women’s Discourse in Graffiti Movements	Hamann et al.	Ex aequo, 2013

• Source: elaborated by the authors based on research data (2020).

Results

Of the 15 articles analyzed qualitatively, the first category in the codebook refers to the theoretical perspective. The texts were classified by reading and identifying references to authorship from gender or feminist perspectives. In this sense, 11 of them (73.3%) mention the concept of gender, gender studies and/or related agendas, and one of them assumes textually that adopted “a gender perspective in the analysis” (ESCOSTEGUY; SIFUENTES; BIANCHINI, 2017, p. 197, our translation⁵). Only four (26.7%) were classified with a feminist approach, having the type of feminism detailed (second category). Two were framed with a poststructuralist/postmodern perspective and two with a postcolonial perspective. In this last group, the article by Joana Passos (2019) can still be classified as a black and political postcolonial feminist approach.

When analyzing racism in the world of fashion, the author, who calls herself a “Portuguese feminist thinker” (PASSOS, 2019, p. 2), highlights the importance of not only deconstructing sexist myths, but also creating “new myths or figures that materialize the new ideas and new utopias proposed by feminist studies and gender studies [...] to think about new political interventions and new forms of activism in the 21st Century” (PASSOS, 2019, p. 4-5). Necessary intervention in fashion and advertising, which together with the dominant beauty standards of whiteness “constitute (micro) mechanisms of discrimination” (PASSOS, 2019, p. 3).

The other article classified as postcolonial is by Cogo (2017) and it focuses on the intersection of gender and migration studies that, impacted by border feminisms, are considered by the author as “a Latin and Latin American version of postcolonial feminisms” (COGO, 2017, p. 182). A highlight of the text is the note of the necessity for research to effectively incorporate the concept of gender and intersectionality, shifting

from the essentialist perspectives of gender and as a critique of the ‘summative’ character of some conceptual and methodological proposals that add to gender other categories of inequalities such as class, race, and generation, without really glimpsing their articulation. [...] the gender category not as a mere sex-gender variable or man versus woman opposition, but as a principle of social organization, production of inequality, and power relations

(COGO, 2017, p. 182).

Articles classified as poststructuralist/postmodern are by Tomaz (2015) and by Melo and Ribeiro (2015). The first author analyzes academic productions with the expressions “Media” and “Motherhood”, and highlights that “although each theme is associated with a specific theoretical contribution, cultural, gender, feminist and poststructuralist studies are present in a broad way in the texts [analyzed]” (TOMAZ, 2015, p. 161). The second ones discuss the concept of performance based on Queer Studies and, with a political feminist approach, highlights as the main conclusion of the research that performance art, as a space of communication in which the body produces messages and expresses subjectivities,

it has been shown to be a powerful political-artistic tool to make visible corporalities in disagreement with the heterosexual imperative [...] it can reach daily, biographical, and artistic critical power at the same time [...] [as] a mixture of the stage and life, a watercolor in which art happens at the same time on the stage, on the asphalt and in the flesh

(MELO; RIBEIRO, 2015, p. 239-240).

As for the methodology used (third category), all texts focus on presenting the qualitative analysis of the results. Of the articles, 14 textually mention the use of a qualitative methodology, and only one mentions the use of a mixed approach, the one written by Gabriel and Freitas Júnior (2016). The authors carried out a search for the productions of the sports section from Folha de S.Paulo with the keyword “Seleção”, which contained the mention of the Brazilian national team in 2011 (year of the 6th Germany World Cup), which “allowed verification and quantitative/qualitative analysis at different times (before, during and after the competition), making it possible to perceive the visibility that the newspaper allocated to women’s football in its sports section” (GABRIEL; FREITAS JÚNIOR, 2016, p. 376).

Regarding the procedures used in research (fourth category), three articles used document analysis, whether bibliographical, documental, or a literature review (LELO, 2019; MORETTI-PIRES; TESSER JÚNIOR; KOVALESKI, 2018; TOMAZ, 2015); and three Content Analysis (PANKE; IASULAITIS, 2016; GABRIEL; FREITAS JÚNIOR, 2016; OLIVEIRA et al., 2016). We emphasize that the research by Cavalcante et al. (2016) was based on the Critical-Emancipatory Workshop (CEW). This activity, in which 23 teenagers participated, was filmed, the speeches were recorded and transcribed, and the final content was decoded using Content Analysis.

Cogo’s research (2017) mixes procedures to discuss the interrelationships between communication, gender, and transnational migrations – mainly Latin American ones. She uses literature review, surveys, the documentary Angel, and interviews to

discuss two axes of studies that focus on the consumption and use of Communication and Information Technologies (ICTs) within the framework of migratory experiences and gender relations (...) gender dynamics linked to the consumption and use of technologies in the processes of constitution and interaction of so-called transnational families (...) [and] appropriation of technologies in experiences of mobilization and activism in which gender and migration are articulated

(COGO, 2017, p. 178).

The other articles made use of other techniques such as: cinedebates (CAVALCANTE et al., 2016), interviews (HAMANN et al., 2013), semi-structured interviews and Discourse Analysis (PEREIRA; PONTES; RIBEIRO, 2015), case studies (PASSOS, 2019), ethnography (MELO; RIBEIRO, 2015), analysis of communication contracts by Charaudeau (RIZZOTTO, 2014), classification of videos with the WebQDA software (SO et al., 2016), Map of Communicative Mediations of Culture by Martín-Barbero (ESCOSTEGUY; SIFUENTES; BIANCHINI, 2017).

As for the analyzed objects (fifth category) (Graphic 3), only three types appeared in more than one article. It is the case of the printed newspaper present in the research of Moretti-Pires, Tesser Júnior, and Kovaleski (2018) and Gabriel and Freitas Júnior (2016); of visual productions (institutional videos and a documentary, respectively) in Cavalcante et al. (2016) and So et al. (2016), both published in Ciência & Saúde Coletiva; and Communication and Information Technologies (ICTs) in Cogo (2017) and Escosteguy, Sifuentes, and Bianchini (2017), both published in Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação.

Graphic 3
Theme and objects analyzed in the corpus

The other articles analyze the game Papo Reto (OLIVEIRA et al., 2016); the autobiographical book of the model Iman (PASSOS, 2019); electoral spots in television advertising (PANKE; IASULAITIS, 2016); journalism companies (LELO, 2019); academic productions on the Capes Journal Portal, Google Scholar and the Open Access Scientific Repository of Portugal with the words “Media” and “Motherhood” (TOMAZ, 2015); performance art (MELO; RIBEIRO, 2015); the criteria adopted by photographers in the sports recording of men and women (PEREIRA; PONTES; RIBEIRO, 2015); the posts of the feminist blog Write Lola Write (RIZZOTTO, 2014) and Street Art occupations (HAMANN et al., 2013).

As for the analysis themes of the articles, most of them address the issue of gender discrimination (26.7%). In second place are the topics of work and sexuality (20% each). The subject of maternity and childcare appears in third place (13.3%). Finally, there are themes of migration, race and ethnicity, and non-gender violence (6.7% each).

For the analysis of the authors cited in the references of the articles, we have decided to use bibliometric data and the Gephi Software. For this, we transformed each name of the author and co-author of the references into a variable (node) and generated the network of cited authors (Graphic 4). We chose this path because it allows visually identify the most cited authors and the list of citations within the studied area.

Graphic 4
Network of authors cited in the corpus references

The most cited author in the references of the works was Joan Scott, followed by Judith Butler. The text by Scott (1991) referenced in the four articles is “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, in different versions, one in English and two different translations. In it, Scott proposes that gender is an analytical category based on feminist practices, and her work becomes a reference for subsequent studies. Based on her work, academic research began to implement the understanding of gender as an initial form of social relations of power and domination based on perceived differences between the sexes.

Butler (2012) is mentioned in three articles, all of which cite her book “Gender Problems: Feminism and Subversion of Identity”, the English version, and two editions of the translation made by Civilização Brasileira. In the work, the author problematizes the idea that sex is natural, and gender is socially constituted, dismantling the sex/gender duality. Melo and Ribeiro (2015) also cite the chapter by Butler (2000), “Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’”, in the book by Guacira Lopes Louro, entitled “The Educated Body: Pedagogies of Sexuality”.

The other authors present in the graphic appear in two articles: Ana Escosteguy, Jorge Knijnik, Katia Rubio, Maria Minayo, Mauro Betti, Rosa Fonseca, and Sivana Goellner. It is worth noting that of these authors, four are in the two articles that address sport (PEREIRA; PONTES; RIBEIRO, 2015; GABRIEL; FREITAS JÚNIOR, 2016). Mauro Betti writes about the relationship between the media and sport, politics, television, and entertainment, not focusing on gender issues. The works of Jorge Knijnik, Katia Rubio, and Silvana Goellner focus on the relationship between sport and gender, the participation of women, masculinities, femininities, and media coverage of these themes. Ana Escosteguy appears in articles by Cogo (2017) and Tomaz (2015) with works on communication and its relationship with gender, motherhood, and the use of technologies by rural families.

Maria Minayo and Rosa Fonseca are cited in the articles by So et al. (2016) and Oliveira et al. (2016). The first analyzes the contribution of institutional videos in coping with domestic violence against children, and the second an online game to work on the theme of sexuality with adolescents. Maria Minayo has two articles cited, “Violence and Health as an Interdisciplinary Field of Collective Action” and “The Challenge of Knowledge. Qualitative Health Research”. Rosa Fonseca has seven productions cited as author or co-author. Her greatest partnership takes place in four articles with Emiko Y. Egry and three articles with Maíra R. Apostoólico. These articles discuss, from a gender perspective, violence against children and/or adolescents, sexuality, and the contributions of the OTC technique.

The qualitative analysis and data presented here show that there is a diversity of areas and subjects addressed by the articles that are within the scope of the fourth wave feminist themes, but that also bring up previous issues of the feminist movement regarding gender asymmetries in society. Case of debates about women in institutionalized spaces of power (first wave), the relationship between public and private (second wave), and intersectionality (third wave).

The themes of previous feminist waves remain in the fourth wave, mainly in an intersectional way, as we see in the analyzed texts that present the different forms of gender violence (sexual harassment, stalking, and human trafficking); relations between gender, race, and ethnicity (racism and beauty standards, transnational migration flows and the hypersexualization of migrant women); issues related to the LGBT+ population (non-binary and LGBTQ gender representation in migrations); motherhood (mothers of children with disabilities); religious prejudice; and asymmetries and wage inequality in the labor market.

Even if some articles do not deal specifically with feminism, the issues they address are part of contemporary feminist agendas. Although the fourth feminist wave is marked by a plurality of themes in its guidelines and assumed to be intersectional, it emphasizes the issues of gender violence, among them the femicide and sexual harassment issues (DRUMMOND, 2020). Of the analyzed texts, some mix gender and disability, or gender and migratory status, or racism in the world of fashion, and although they do not use the term, they deal with intersectional issues.

Final Considerations

In general, data from the Web of Science show that there has been a significant increase in academic production regarding gender and communication issues from 1975 to 2019. In this article, specifically, we look at publications in the SciELO database from 2013 to 2019, written in Portuguese, from the field of Social Sciences, and from the research areas of Communication, Women’s Studies, and Cultural Studies.

The data result of the analysis made with the variables defined by our qualitative Content Analysis (theoretical and methodological perspectives; objects and/or subjects of analysis, etc.) presented an interesting panorama. We verified in the 15 articles chosen for the qualitative analysis that 11 mention gender studies and/or related guidelines, and only four were classified with a feminist approach, with half adopting a post-colonial perspective and the other half poststructuralist/postmodern.

We noticed that although most of the texts do not mention the word “feminist” and its derivations, they all deal with themes from the guidelines that we can classify as fourth wave feminism, mainly due to the focus given to intersectionality, issues of women’s bodies, or gender violence. We also noticed an increase in publications from 2013, a period that marks the beginning of the so-called new feminist wave and the beginning of the demonstrations of the June Journeys in Brazil. It reflects the greater concern with gender issues from that moment on, inflamed by the conservative measures that were taking place in the country.

We observe that these studies use Scott’s (1991) perspective as a reference, followed by Butler’s (2012), which shows the relevance given to these studies as landmarks for gender studies. But here we emphasize that even with all the history of feminism and its advances, many texts with a feminist approach do not mention the term “Feminism” or one of its variations, treating only gender issues, which can still demonstrate a stigma with the use of the word in the Academy.

As for the citations of the same reference in more than one work, we emphasize that, on the one hand, this shows that there is little dialogue within some areas (Sports, Communication, and Health) and, on the other hand, it highlights the lack of dialogue that prevails in the set of our corpus, even though all of them present research on gender and communication themes. It makes us question whether this pattern extends to the entire field of gender and communication studies and shows the need for more research that incorporates other databases and other types of scientific production.

In this sense, we emphasize the possibilities and limitations the data collection technique inspired by the systematic review presents. Regarding the potentialities, this way of carrying out the research not only allows the addition of a greater number of relevant results but also enables the synthesis of studies on the subject, helping in the process of updating the theme for researchers and in the perception of the themes within of a specific scientific culture. It can produce panoramas of studies in an area or theme at a global level, or else a comparison between world production and other cuts, as in the case of SciELO, which allows free access to productions from the global South and in Portuguese. As for the limits, we highlight those relating to the filters established in the corpus eligibility stages. Not only related to keywords or the area where they will be searched that can exclude important works but also in the definition by a specific database. An example is our research that some journals of Social Communication and related areas in Brazil are not indexed in SciELO.

Finally, we emphasize that this research does not end here. Other variables can be defined, such as, for example, the most used concepts regarding gender research; gender, and authorship origin of the articles to define who researches on this subject. Furthermore, it is also possible to explore production in Latin America using, in addition to Portuguese, the Spanish language.

• 1
  We use the denomination of waves for the periods of the feminist movement as a didactic way of trying to maintain a chronology agreed upon by the official historiography that remains prevalent. However, we recognize that this classification tries to periodize the events, but it has gaps, since it considers this historical process as linear when in fact it is not, in addition to highlighting the difficulty in treating the feminist movement as plural, in how to tell the stories of feminisms, valuing their narratives, their voices and the struggle for rights and access processes that are different according to intersectional issues such as race, ethnicity, social class, among other aspects. In summary, this classification understands the first wave between the end of the 19th Century and the middle of the 20th Century, characterized by the struggle for the right to vote, working conditions, and education; the second from 1960 to 1980, with the slogan “The personal is political”, which represents the fight against the social organization that reserves naturalized and hierarchical roles and places for people according to their sex (public vs private); the third begins in the late 1980s and addresses gender theories and post-feminism, questioning the concept of women as homogeneous and treating women as individuals with different life experiences, who suffer different types of oppression related to issues of class, race, sexual diversity, among others (intersectionality).
• 2
  In addition to African countries such as Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe, Brazil is the largest Portuguese-speaking country, a legacy of the colonization of Portugal.
• 3
  Search string: Topic: (gender AND communication). Refinements: Years of publication: (2019 OR 2018 OR 2017 OR 2016 OR 2015 OR 2014 OR 2013) AND Databases: (SciELO) AND Search domains: (Social Sciences) AND Document types: (Article) AND Languages: (Portuguese) AND Research areas: (Communication AND Women’s Studies AND Cultural Studies). Results: Topic, 20,714. Years of publication, 11,256; Databases, 334; Search domains, 246; Document Types, 243; Languages, 71; Research areas, 33.
• 4
  We decided to reproduce the acronym used in each article and not define a standard to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, travesty, transgender, intersex, queer, and other gender identities, sexual orientations, and existing understandings of sexuality.
• 5
  All the references written originally in Portuguese have been freely translated.

Funding

• Research funded with the aid of the CNPq Universal Edict (CNPq/MCTI/FNDCT Nº 18/2021 and Finance Cod 0001) and Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support in the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) Postdoc Scholarship Note 10, process E-26/204.330/2021-BOLSA.

Data availability

The authors confirm that the data supporting the fi ndings of this study are available within the article and/or its supplementary material. The supplementary material is available online: Codebook (in Portuguese).

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Edited by

Editor: Maria Ataide Malcher

Editorial assistant: Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  27 Oct 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  30 Sept 2021
• Accepted
  08 June 2023