Disability versus Handicapped Person: one discoursive analisys of the newspapers Zero Hora and Correio do Povo

Abstract

This research consists of an analysis of the news about handicapped persons in the newspapers Zero Hora and Correio do Povo, from Porto Alegre, from the perspective of Discourse Analysis. With the aim of denaturalizing the production process of the journalistic discourse related to the way it shows the handicapped person, it is questioned if this way of showing reinforces or not the stigma of disability. Within a corpus of 87 pieces of news published from August 1st to September 30, 2001, the dominant discoursive structures were mapped and their source enunciators were identified, locating the speeches that came from two sources: from social assistance entities and professionals that work with handicapped persons, on one hand, and social movements on the other hand voices that permeate the journalistic discourse and help to set it up. The aim was to understand the specific production conditions of journalistic discourse and to identify the existing tension among emergent discourses from handicapped persons social movements, the surrounding discourses that concern those people and the journalistic discourse about that population section. It was considered that, preexisting journalistic discourse, there are two dominant discoursive lines circulating in the political and social fields: the citizenship line, that is the discourse of the handicapped person and refers to the movements that seek for autonomy and equality of access conditions to the many fields of life; and the assistantship line, a discourse about the issue, that surrounds the handicapped person, founding its perspective through the deficit view: a handicapped person is someone who primarily lacks something, and because of that, needs external assistance.