A epidemia de AIDS nas páginas da Revista Manchete durante os anos de 1985 e 2000

Abstract

The AIDS epidemic marked the end of the 20th century, influencing new behaviors. In turn, it was signified and influenced by social actors such as medicine and the press. One of the printed media that presented AIDS to the Brazilian population was Manchete magazine during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of this research was to understand how this weekly newspaper constructed the epidemic in its pages in these two decades. To this end, a survey was carried out in the magazine's collection of the Brazilian Digital Library. A total of 646 texts on HIV/AIDS were collected from 1982 to 2000. After the survey, the themes on which this textual corpus dealt were listed, in which the most prominent were Science, Medicine and Health (208); Art and Famous People (138); and Sex and Sexuality (101). The methodology used to analyze this corpus was Discourse Analysis. A tool that was used to assist in this process was the Iramuteq software with the Descending Hierarchical Classification and Word Cloud analyses. The two main theorists addressed here were Susan Sontag (1989), in the positions she proposes on the role that the creation of metaphors for diseases play in understanding them, especially AIDS, and Fausto Neto (1991, 1999), especially when he addresses the concept of Olympians, the approach of these when HIV-positive in mass communication. The focus of the analysis was on the magazine's cover stories that had a greater connection with the scientific discourse and the lives of celebrities, the Manchete Saúde insert, government HIV campaigns broadcast in the weekly and readers' letters sent about the epidemic Thus, it was possible to understand that Manchete magazine had a complex role in this process, because at the same time it consolidated some metaphors in relation to AIDS, it also played the role of informing society about the new epidemic.