Marielle, presente!
How the coverage of the murder of a black, lesbian and peripheral councilwoman helped to construct a sense of community among Brazilian women:
An analysis of mainstream and independent feminist media
Giselle Silva dos Santos Student ID: 12846856
Master’s Thesis
Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Journalism, Media and Globalization Graduate School of Communication
Supervisor: Dr. Penny Sheets Thibaut, PhD
Word count: 9.496
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Abstract
On the 14th of March 2018, the councilwoman and human rights activist Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were ambushed and shot to death in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But what was meant to be just an addition to the already high crime rates of the country prompted international outrage and gave the minorities defended by Franco a chance to rise up and have their voices heard in politics and by the media. Through a Critical
Discourse Analysis of articles published by Brazilian feminist, independent online media and mainstream news outlets, this paper aims to understand how the coverage of the murder of a black, lesbian and peripheral councilwoman helped to construct a sense of community among Brazilian women. Results show that it happened mainly through the building of an
intersectional community that speaks for the empowerment of black women and against the hegemonic structures and the multidimensionality of the oppression. This research provides an opportunity to reflect on the implications of social changes to the status quo, the future of media and political representation in general.
Keywords: Marielle Franco, Critical Discourse Analysis, community, cyberactivism, feminism, intersectionality, multidimensionality of the oppression.
Introduction
Although the assassinations of politicians and human rights activists are not rare occurrences in Brazil, Marielle Franco’s execution, ambushed and shot to death alongside her driver, Anderson Gomes, on the 14th of March 2018 – and the still unsolved question of who ordered her murder – triggered a national outrage (Haynes, 2018) with potential for long-lasting social and political implications. As a black, lesbian and peripheral councilwoman who disturbed the status quo by working in favour of the disadvantaged population of
3 created a gap that quickly became a legacy, as thousands of Brazilians flocked to the streets to mourn her and demand a resolution to the case. Two years later, phrases like “Marielle vive” and “Marielle presente” – Marielle lives and Marielle is here, respectively – are reminders that her voice and ideals live on, as her name became known throughout the world (Londoño, 2019; Waldron, 2018).
With the massive commotion generated by her murder, national news outlets began to wonder ‘who was this woman?’. A rookie politician with little name recognition in the national sphere, what made her so special to the point that she “became a global symbol of resistance to the rising conservative tide”? (Londoño, 2019). Part of the answer lies in her ‘peripheral origins’ – a term indicating underprivileged neighbourhoods; she was born and raised at Complexo da Maré, a favela in the north of Rio de Janeiro – and intersectional activism. As highlighted by The New York Times, Franco’s uniqueness factor in Brazilian politics made her “a role model for people who do not see themselves represented in a system dominated by white men” (Londoño, 2019). Coincidentally or not, the first national elections after her death, in October 2018, were characterized by a rise in the number of women elected to the Chamber of Deputies (“Bancada feminina”, 2018). This is specifically important as more black and peripheral women are now part of the National Congress, which also elected its first indigenous congresswoman in 196 years of the Chamber’s history. What is unclear, however, is how media coverage of her murder may have facilitated such political
mobilization among, in particular, black and peripheral women in Brazil.
Previous research has examined Marielle Franco’s case, with diverse outcomes. Rocha (2018) highlighted the legislator’s work in favour of the population in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, places where racism, discrimination and social inequality have been a stigma for generations. Lins and Lopes (2018) analysed the propagation of fake news against Marielle Franco as a media phenomenon, concluding that they were substantiated by negative female
4 stereotypes that slandered and disqualified women as a gender suited to playing powerful roles. On a different note, Danin, Carvalho and Reis (2018) tackled the international coverage of Franco’s execution and how journalism portrayed the relationship between black people and the police. Although very valuable, none of these studies help to understand how Marielle Franco’s death and its coverage in the media sparked a movement that would lead people to gather towards her ideals, even inspiring other women, as well as representatives of black, peripheral and LGBTQ collectives, to pursue a path in politics.
Therefore, this paper proposes to fill this gap by discussing the coverage of Marielle Franco’s case under a different standpoint: the construction of a sense of community and belonging. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of articles published by mainstream and independent, feminist online media, I aim to answer to the following research question: To what extent did the coverage of the murder of a black, lesbian and peripheral
councilwoman help to construct a sense of community among Brazilian women?
Theoretical framework
Media, cyberactivism and the internet in Brazil
In order to understand the particularities of online media coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder, it is important to comprehend its cyberactivist nature. Sandoval-Almazan and Gil-Garcia (2014) set out to contextualize how social movements and political activism nowadays rely on social media and other information technologies. They argue that since social protests have become “powerful expressions against government regimes or specific public policies” (p. 365), technology has made this process easier, with people using its tools to communicate, share information and mobilize citizens. These new online activities consist in what they call cyberactivism.
5 Examples of it are all around the world. Khamis and Vaughn (2013) discussed the role played by cyberactivism and new media in paving the way for political transformation
following both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2011. According to Bounenni (as cited in Khamis & Vaughn, 2013), citizen journalists used the Internet and social media to mitigate the harsh media control enforced by the Tunisian government, becoming “an important source of news for the international media, posting videos of the protests and providing updates on the numbers killed” (p. 73). Cyberactivism had equally significant potential in the context of the Egyptian Arab Spring. As noted by Khamis and Vaughn (2013), both Tunisian and Egyptian activists collaborated with each other in the exchange of useful tactics and advice to overcome their respective repressive regimes.
Within the context of the Brazilian media system, where the state privileges media activity as being private and commercial (Lima, as cited in Barros, 2017), cyberactivism becomes a tool of content democratization, since the ownership of mainstream media outlets is concentrated in the hands of a few actors, such as religious and entrepreneurial groups, powerful families and political oligarchies (Azevedo, 2006; Marinoni, 2015; Cabral, 2016; Barros, 2017).
In this sense, cyberactivism has provided an educational environment for the native people of Brazil to reaffirm their indigenous identities and pluralities. The use of the Internet among the indigenous population and their “appropriation, interaction, and production of content” served to challenge “interpretative schemes that insist on the categorization of stereotypes” (Pereira, 2013, p. 1864), giving them a voice and therefore becoming a powerful communication tool in a society dominated and colonized by old, white and rich men.
This relationship between minorities and the digital world can also be observed when it comes to gender, characterizing the concept of cyberfeminism (Ferreira, 2015). Matos (2017, p. 430) explored how feminist media in Brazil have engaged in new ways of using
6 technologies for development and empowerment, articulating “counter-hegemonic discourses which go against traditional representations of gender”. These cyberfeminist platforms aiming to disseminate women’s rights are particularly important within the context of developing countries such as Brazil, since they empower “different perspectives from the mainstream” (Matos, 2017, p. 431).
Yet, the opportunities provided by the Internet to partake in a critical debate are still not as democratized as they should be. Daniels (2009) emphasizes how, from the economic stance, women remain the poorest global citizens, which compromises their access to technology and information. This aspect is even more pronounced when you analyse the intersections between gender and race, since most of the practices and critiques in the field suggest that gender “is a unified category and, by implication, that digital technologies mean the same thing to all women across differences of race, class, sexuality” (p. 103). Therefore, it is important to look at cases such as that of Marielle’s death, to see how internet-facilitated discourses may address female and, in particular, intersectional, identities.
Gender and intersectionality
This paper uses the theoretical perspective of intersectionality to challenge the notion of gender as a unified category. In order to do so, I will first briefly define what composes gender. According to Butler (1988), gender is in no way a stable identity, but an identity constituted over time “through a stylized repetition of acts” that create “the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (p. 519). In this sense, she argues that gender is nothing but a
performance to an audience in which the own actors come to believe. It is not biological, but a performative act and a social practice that follows the understanding disseminated by society.
In its turn, intersectionality is defined by Shields (2008, p. 301) as “the mutually constitutive relations among social identities”. The intersectional perspective highlights that
7 an individual’s social location and identities, such as race, class, ethnicity and sexual
orientation, can heavily influence their experience of gender, “that must be understood in the context of power relations” (Collins, as cited in Shields, 2008, p. 301). Like the gender definition proposed by Butler (1988) – which by itself constitutes one category of identity – this position is claimed and practised, rather than passively accepted.
To explain the distinctive forms of oppression experienced by people with intersecting and subordinate identities, Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) have conceptualized the notion of intersectional invisibility. Their central argument is that androcentrism, ethnocentrism and heterocentrism, meaning the tendency to define the standard person as male, member of a dominant ethnic group and heterosexual, may cause people who have multiple subordinate identities to be perceived as “non-prototypical members of their constituent identity groups” (p. 378). In this sense, a black and lesbian woman like Marielle Franco would not usually fit into her respective subordinate groups – black people, LGBT people, women. Therefore, she would be deemed socially invisible, a marginal member within marginalized sub-groups.
The multidimensionality of the oppression
In her work Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis (1981) outlines how the legacy left by slavery in the United States set up standards that have been historically enforced over black women throughout the years. She notes that, proportionately, more black women have always worked outside their homes in comparison to white women, in a pattern established during the earliest days of slavery. In a historical reconstitution of the period, she also recounts that for both black men and women, where work was concerned, “the threat of the whip outweighed considerations of sex” (p. 6), meaning that the oppression suffered was identical to both genders. Women, however, were additionally subjected to different types of tormenting that were inherently attributed to their gender: sexual coercion and rape.
8 This echoes the understanding of scholars who believe that the intersections created by marginalized identities amount in a scale of oppression. Consequently, “people with multiple subordinate identities will be subjected to more prejudice and discrimination than those with a single subordinate identity” (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008, p. 379). This is the premise that constitutes the multidimensionality of the oppression. The perception was shared by scholars in their discussion of the forms of subjugation of black women (Davis, 1981; hooks, 1981; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Berruz, 2016). From the days of slavery and white colonization until today, institutionalized racism and sexism, as in patriarchy, have formed the base of our social structures (hooks, 1981). Here lies the importance to reflect upon intersectionality.
Ribeiro (2016) criticizes the epistemological silence within the feminist movement that does not contemplate how the levels of oppression can be combined to deny black women and other subordinate groups their place as political subjects. In a society
characterized by being “patriarchal, classist and slavery-promoting” (p. 102), to think about intersectionality “is to perceive that there can be no primacy of one form of oppression over all others” (Ribeiro, 2016, p. 101).
To the purpose of this research, the emphasis of my analysis will be placed on the theory of the multidimensionality of the oppression and how it might scale up depending on the multiple subordinate identities that are added to the equation. This way, I will be able to analyse the part that it plays in the creation of communities within the coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder.
Imagined communities, culture and sense of belonging
Finally, as this study aims to understand how the coverage of the murder of Marielle Franco helped to construct a sense of community among Brazilian women, it is important to investigate how the building of online imagined communities can offer alternatives to
9 mainstream societal structures. Brint (2001) defines communities as “aggregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally (emphasis in original) by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or personal concern” (p. 8). He contends that communities are based on a sense of familiarity within its members, which could be built among individuals that have shared similar life experiences but never physically met before, also deriving from particular events, such as a tragedy, cultural or social aspects, like gender, race and sexual orientation, generating a collective impact.
This sense of familiarity was addressed by Anderson (1991) in relation to nations and imagined communities. According to him, “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (p. 6). In this sense, nations can also be defined as imagined political communities that are inherently limited and sovereign. Imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, […] yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6).
Anderson (1991) also asserts that this shared feeling of communion provided by nations can fulfil cultural needs, since they give meaning and a sense of direction to its citizens. These cultural systems provide the members of these imagined communities with a sense of belonging. As described by Delanty (2003), the communication ties and cultural structures developed by contemporary societies, amplified by globalization, have opened possibilities for belonging based on religion, nationalism, ethnicity, lifestyle and gender. This includes minorities and their agenda, rebelling against oppressive majorities and asserting “their individuality in declarations of identity, solidarity, belonging and roots” (Delanty, 2003, p. 191).
The very idea of community, in Delanty’s (2003) perspective, seems to suggest a critique of the status quo, offering an alternative to society. In this sense, the relevance of the concept lies in the fragmentation of old constructions of society, that gives place to
10 pluralization, cultural developments and global forms of communication, such as the
cyberactivist initiatives analysed in this paper.
According to Williams (as cited in Hall, 1993), the process of community is, in fact, the process of communication, aligned to “the sharing of common meanings” (p. 352),
activities and purposes that he defined as culture. This definition, however, was understood by Hall (1993) as abstract, since it remained blind to questions of race. In his work, Hall (1993) emphasized how nation-states were, without exceptions, “ethnically hybrid”, as the product of conquests, colonization and absorptions of different sorts (p. 356). These processes produced multicultural communities that were, and still remain, ethnically, linguistically, religiously and culturally mixed.
Yet, being the product of particular histories, traditions and beliefs, one might find difficult to adapt within the boundaries of their own nation (Cohen, 1985), “belonging at the same time to several 'homes' – and thus to no one particular home” (Hall, 1993, p. 362). That is why this process of overlapping communities, much similar to the overlapping subordinate identities that constitute the concept of intersectional invisibility, could be seen as repressive. Characteristic of modernity, however, it is also what makes identities so complex and always under construction.
Considering the theories discussed and how they are intertwined, I have elaborated the following supporting sub-research questions:
RQ1: What are the main social discourses present in the coverage of Marielle
Franco’s case by the feminist media analysed?
RQ2: To what extent is the sense of community fostered in these cyberactivist
initiatives?
RQ3: What are the differences in the coverage and community aspects raised by
11
Methods
To better understand to what extent the coverage of the murder of the councilwoman Marielle Franco helped to construct a sense of community, I opted for a qualitative research design. According to Bryman (2012, p. 380), “qualitative research is a research strategy that usually emphasizes words rather than quantification in the collection and analysis of data”, allowing the researcher to see through the eyes of the people being studied. It begins with assumptions, where interpretive or theoretical frameworks can be employed as a tool to understand the meaning attributed to social or human problems (Creswell, 1998).
As the main goal of this paper is to understand how the coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder was intertwined with aspects such as gender, race and sexual orientation to form communities and construct meaning, it makes sense to approach the topic as a Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA). Discourse, meaning the language used verbally or in textual form, is a social practice, in the sense that it can help to maintain and “reproduce the social status quo”, but at the same time it contributes to transform it (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 258). It is also, according to Blommaert and Bulcaen (2000), a power object, which CDA aims to make “more visible and transparent” (p. 448).
CDA explores the intersections between language, discourse patterns and social structures and problematizes the power relations within the messages delivered, also evaluating them in the moral and political spectrum and the effects that they should have in society: “empowering the powerless, giving voices to the voiceless, exposing power abuse, and mobilizing people to remedy social wrongs” (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000, p. 449). Van Dijk’s understanding of CDA, in its turn, focuses on the structure or strategy employed in text or verbal interactions to reproduce or challenge dominance exerted by “elites, institutions or
12 groups, that results in social inequality, including political, cultural, class, ethnic, racial and gender inequality” (1993, p. 249-250).
Although he admits his approach is biased, since it emphasizes top-down relations of social power instead of “bottom-up relations of resistance, compliance and acceptance” (van Dijk, 1993, p. 250), he also highlights how CDA is “primarily interested and motivated by pressing social issues” (van Dijk, 1993, p. 252). The goal is to go in-depth into these cognitive relations of power, culture and society in order to provide insights that can contribute to social change (see also Mullet, 2018).
With this in mind, I have used CDA to analyse a corpus of 60 texts (see Appendix A). Half of them were published by feminist, independent media divided as follows: 10 texts published by the online magazine AzMina, 10 from the blog Blogueiras Negras (Black Bloggers), 5 from the blog Blogueiras Feministas (Feminist Bloggers), and 5 from the website Nós, Mulheres da Periferia (Us, Women from the Periphery). The feminist media platforms were selected for their approach of promoting gender empowerment through information (Buitoni & Lopes, 2018; Souza & Zucolo, 2018), communicating with the same minorities that were defended by Marielle Franco during her political career (AzMina, n.d.; Blogueiras Feministas, n.d.; Nós, Mulheres da Periferia, n.d.; Nunes, n.d.). The remaining 30 pieces correspond to mainstream media outlets, the three leading Brazilian newspapers in circulation – Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo and O Estado de S. Paulo (“Average paid”, 2020) – with 10 texts each.
The analysed texts include articles, editorials and opinion pieces covering Marielle Franco’s death, as they might be indicative of the mobilization generated by the specific event. The articles were published within the timeframe of two years: from the 14th of March 2018, date of the councilwoman’s murder, to the 18th of March 2020, four days after the two-year anniversary of her death. After conducting a search over the selected websites using the
13 terms “Marielle” and “Marielle Franco”, I narrowed down the scope of data by subtracting features that only mentioned the keywords, but had no relation to the coverage of her murder or its implications. As for the sampling, it was done purposively geared to maximum variation through theoretical construct sampling, in the sense that the texts were selected to cover diverse aspects of the coverage of Marielle Franco’s death, for example, the repercussions of her murder, the movements that followed, her performance as legislator and activist. The goal was “to sample cases/participants in a strategic way, so that those sampled are relevant to the research questions that are being posed” (Bryman, 2012, p. 418).
Concerning the coding process (see Appendix B for examples, in Portuguese), I have started with the First Cycle approach of Initial Coding (Saldaña, 2009). As an open-ended approach to coding data, this method allows the researcher to break down qualitative data into parts, closely examining them and comparing for similarities or discrepancies (Strauss & Corbin, as cited in Saldaña, 2009, p. 81). Moving on to the axial coding, the codes found were narrowed down and merged into categories, according to similar patterns or the discourses reflected by them. Finally, in the third and final stage, the theoretical coding, the axial categories were reduced to core concepts connected to the theoretical framework in order to answer to the research questions. All the coding was done manually and the process
documented, as I believe this method was better suited to the identification of particularities in the discourses analysed, increasing the trustworthiness of this paper, as in credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability (Bryman, 2012). Due to time constraints, translations from Portuguese to English have only been carried out for specific sections of text that needed to be quoted within this paper.
14 After the coding process, I have identified 25 axial categories (see Appendix C) that were merged into nine main discourses that permeated the coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder in both feminist, independent media and mainstream outlets. Pertaining to the first sub-research question, which analysed the main social discourses depicted in the coverage of Marielle Franco’s case by online feminist media, the core categories found will be presented as follows: Marielle Franco became a symbol; community and representativeness; the
multidimensionality of the oppression; intersectionality and empowerment; power versus the people; and Brazil is structurally flawed.
The three remaining theoretical codes – attack on democracy, political tensions and the investigation is not over – will be mentioned in the last section of the results, as they were more prominent in the mainstream coverage of the councilwoman’s case.
Marielle Franco became a symbol
The discourse present in the coverage by feminist, independent media revealed that it reinforced the idea that the councilwoman became a symbol. This aspect is particularly present in an article published by the magazine AzMina that states that the murder of the legislator shocked the country for its brutality and for representing “a direct attack on many symbols: woman, black, lesbian and from the favela” (Ponte Jornalismo, 2018). The text added that more than just a single person, the bullets aimed at Marielle Franco “hurt groups and ideals” (Ponte Jornalismo, 2018), which already infuses in their readers a sense of community and cultural belonging (Anderson, 1991; Brint, 2001; Delanty, 2003) that relies heavily on the identification with marginalized social identities (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008).
The language used evoked transformation. Marielle “became a bridge” (Ferreira, 2019), “built a path” (Athayde, 2018), and “keeps moving structures after her death” (Folego,
15 2019). It also constantly referenced violent expressions and metaphors of a war in which she became a martyr: the protests after her death were characterized by “war cries” (Moreira, 2018), “struggle” and “resistance” (“Carta aberta”, 2020); ); her “mission” (Athayde, 2018; Paes, 2018; “Carta aberta”, 2020) was left unfinished; the “fight is far from being over” (Lisboa, 2019); and “we are an army” (“Respeitem a memória”, 2018).
Furthermore, the commotion generated by her murder ended up being an incentive for young black women to fight against racism and social inequality (Silva, P., 2018b). In this sense, the feminist coverage suggested that, once Marielle Franco joined the violence
statistics, she also “became a bridge for other women” (Ferreira, 2019) to follow the political path through the “Marielle Effect” (Ponte Jornalismo, 2018), where black people, and
especially women, inspired by her political trajectory decided to run as candidates in 2018’s elections, which initiated a valuable debate on social media about the need to be aware of who represents the minorities in politics (Silva, P., 2018b).
Another metaphor present in the coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder is the seed allegory. When she died, Marielle became a seed of hope, inspiring women like her to
empower themselves. Consequently, women like the federal and state deputies elected shortly after her death are among “the seeds that sprouted from loss” (Ferreira, 2019). The
community of women strengthened by what the legislator represented is also referred to as seeds, which “sprouted in bigger fields” keeping her alive in their fight (“Carta aberta”, 2020). However, the metaphor is not only used with a positive connotation. Rocha (2019) highlighted how the commotion started by Marielle’s execution also generated rage towards her figure and denial of the ideals she stood for – a “seed of hate that we have been feeling on our skin daily” – coming from a far-right and conservative quota of the population responsible for the election of the president Jair Bolsonaro.
16 Nevertheless, the transformation of Marielle Franco into a symbol was also portrayed with a negative undertone in a few of the texts, which stressed out how her death was being used not only as a “political platform” (Santos, 2018) by the ones who claimed “ownership of this fight to build another martyr” (Cruz, 2018), but by people who did not understand the implications of her murder acting like they supported her cause, “parading with Marielle stickers like it made them anti-racist” (Mendes, 2019). The effusive critiques reflect the concern of the feminist outlets with discourses that reproduce Marielle Franco’s symbolism out of convenience, without really contemplating the oppressions and intersectional
invisibilities that permeate the debate about her execution.
Community and representativeness
By presenting Marielle Franco as a black and lesbian woman, born and raised in a favela, and the fifth most voted city councillor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the feminist
platforms constructed an heroic image of her that, at the same time, was sufficiently familiar, as she likely belonged to at least one of the same subordinate social groups (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) as the target readers of the publications. This sense of familiarity was so strong that made interviewee and author featured in different texts wonder: “it could have been me” (Paes, 2018; Ponte Jornalismo, 2018).
The coverage of the legislator’s execution also emphasized how representative she was of the Brazilian population. In one example, peripheral women talked about how it was impossible not to see themselves in Marielle. “She was a mother, a black, lesbian, peripheral woman. I am also that woman” (Moreira, 2018b). In this sense, not only they established an imagined community of women who identified themselves with Marielle Franco and felt represented by her, but they inserted themselves, as feminist and independent media outlets, into this narrative. The featuring of several texts written by women who knew Marielle or
17 were close to her also contributed to this sense of proximity, as did their choice of words – “we”, “us”.
The multidimensionality of the oppression
Presented as a member of several subordinate identity groups, Marielle Franco was also subjected to all the sufferings and disadvantages that may come with each of these categories, which amounted in a scale of oppression (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). This can be perfectly seen in the following quote from AzMina magazine: “Four shots on
Marielle’s head. One for each oppression that she represented: Killed the woman. Killed the black. Killed the slum dweller. Killed the lesbian” (Paes, 2018).
In this sense, the feminist coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder denoted its
intersectional approach when it gave voice to the injustices endured by the minorities. It went even further, by resorting to sources that openly asserted that the councilwoman’s execution was more deeply intertwined to the fact that she was black, lesbian and peripheral than to her political trajectory as a socialist, left-winged politician and human rights activist (Silva, E., 2018). In this interpretation, the catalyst factor that led to her assassination was society itself, that treats female, black, peripheral and LGBTQ bodies as “disposable” (Silva, E., 2018) and enforces a system that is patriarchal and racist.
Furthermore, the articles emphasized the idea that being a politician and a public figure with visibility did not save Marielle Franco from becoming a victim of violence, which supports Crenshaw’s (1989) argument that “black women are theoretically erased” (p. 139). This notion, paralleled to Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach’s (2008) concept of intersectional invisibility, is evoked in another text by one of the authors, who stated that the fact that so many black women did not know Marielle until she died “says something about our invisibility while we are alive” (Mendes, 2019).
18 The multidimensionality of the oppression discourse is used by the cyberactivist media not only to make sense of Marielle’s murder, but to elucidate how society works. It can
explain, for example, why minorities’ representativeness in politics is still so low. If society is racist and oppresses those who dare to revolt against the status quo, like Marielle Franco did, marginalized minorities end up paying the price, as “the rope always bursts on the weaker side” (Silva, P., 2018a). Here, the seed allegory played a new role. In one of the articles, Mendes (2019) stated how black women do not want to become seeds, criticizing the idealization of Marielle Franco’s death to make her a martyr.
Another side of the multidimensionality of the oppression prominent in the coverage of the city councillor’s death was the violence against favela residents that happened “with the blessings of the State” (Oliveira, J., 2018). The feminist outlets highlighted how Marielle denounced the violence of the military police of Rio de Janeiro and criticized public security measures (Equipe Azmina, 2018; “Marielle Franco”, 2018; “Nota de pesar”, 2018; Oliveira, S., 2018) enforced by a federal intervention that took place in 2018. The tone was incisive, uttering that the criminalization of favelas mostly inhabited by black people was being used to “justify mass killings” (Pereira, 2018).
Intersectionality and empowerment
As a reaction to the oppression faced by minority groups, the coverage of feminist media was also oriented by a discourse of intersectionality and empowerment, especially concerning black people. As one of the subordinate, and therefore invisible, groups listed by intersectional scholarship, black ethnicities are constantly faced with issues of worthiness and belonging. This is even more apparent within the political sphere. In this sense, Marielle’s intersectional approach in politics, with an agenda targeted towards the fight for human rights, represented a change to the traditional ways (Folego, 2019), challenging “the negligent, elitist,
19 sexist and racist State” (Silva, P., 2018a). However, to those ruling the power structures, change is dangerous.
Indeed, Marielle Franco’s murder and its extensive coverage have placed the media spotlight over the struggles endured by the black population on a daily basis. In this sense, the sudden attention given to an agenda that was usually marginalized was seen by cyberactivist initiatives as a chance of promoting social transformation: “Cases like Marielle’s are meant to make us stronger because they give us a very clear message: this is not where you belong. […] So now we need to increase this disturbance” (P. Silva, 2018b).
Within the intersectional scholarship, Filler (2018) argues that the construction of mass movements must consider the overlapping of oppression systems, since “personal experiences of discriminations, stereotyping, poverty, and other forms of oppression”,
combined with a strong sense of group worth, constitute a powerful stimulus for social justice (Filler, 2018, p. 470). But how to certify that the voice of the minorities will be heard? One of the alternatives supported by the independent outlets was to ensure their political
representativeness. In an example from the corpus, Athayde (2018) proposes that the public “take over social media and support women with feminist candidacies”.
In another initiative, the magazine AzMina engaged actively with cyberactivism as conceptualized by Sandoval-Almazan and Gil-Garcia (2014), using social media, one week before Marielle Franco’s death, to launch a campaign encouraging women to run for public offices (Equipe AzMina, 2018). This activism, aligned with clear text constructions, such as “our presence in institutional politics is the only way to rebuild democracy in Brazil” (Bruno, 2018), evidences the feminist outlets’ approach of promoting female participation in politics, echoing Matos’ (2017) understanding of cyberfeminism. Thus, the coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder did not merely report the facts: it engaged critically in the discussion of its possible implications for politics and society in general.
20
Power versus the people
Another narrative present in the coverage of feminist media of Marielle Franco’s execution was the relationship between power versus the people. This discourse was
characterized by different nuances. To start, there was the notion that institutionalized racism is entrenched within the system, being the source of the violence committed against Marielle and so many other Brazilians. “When a black woman who moved structures from the
periphery to politics is brutally murdered, the message given to us is silence and obedience” (“Carta aberta”, 2020), stated one of the texts.
Here, the idea that the strong always prevail over the weak (Silva, P., 2018a) was strengthened by an account that placed Marielle Franco as a representative of the people who was killed out of “pure hatred” (Silva, E., 2018) to “intimidate those who denounce black genocide and fight for human rights” (“Marielle Franco”, 2018). In this sense, the coverage raised a reflection about racial construction in Brazil and its relations with hegemony. With a colonial past of slavery that set up standards reinforced across the years, similarly to what happened at the United States (Davis, 1981), the power structures in Brazil are still mainly piled up in the hands of white elites, with no intentions of giving up their privileges and their “power of being able to speak and define what others can do” (Pereira, 2018).
In this sense, a black woman like Marielle Franco would never be welcomed by whiteness, “after all, her message is the revolution itself” (“Respeitem a memória”, 2018). The coverage also highlighted how this pattern of domination is reflected in politics. Not only, in a country where black people are more than half of the population, the political elite is composed in its majority by white men (Silva, P., 2018b), but each election, since 1989, brings “a more conservative Congress” (Athayde, 2018). In this scenario, the system not only
21 disregards the injustices fought by Marielle Franco, but it “authorizes and profits from them” (Ferreira, 2018).
Even political allies and the ones who should be supporting an intersectional cause stand in a conniving silence. That was the criticism against the opportunistic left-wing which uses Marielle Franco as a symbol but ignores her agenda (Cruz, 2018; Santos, 2018), or chooses to finance candidates with “more electoral appeal” (Silva, P., 2018b). Furthermore, there are those who are also oppressed who continue to feed the system that preys on them. P. Silva (2018b) pointed out how the white elite remains in power because of the support of a large number of white poor people who still believe that they can solve the problems of the country, while the rich and conservative electorate only approves candidacies “tailored to preserve their secular privileges”.
This aspect of the coverage can be linked to van Dijk’s (1993) notion of a top-down relation of control that is not just imposed, but could be “jointly produced”, for example, “when dominated groups are persuaded, by whatever means, that dominance is ‘natural’ or otherwise legitimate” (p. 250). Pertaining to the discourse of power versus the people, there is also another interesting point raised by the coverage of Marielle Franco’s case by feminist online media: the distrust with how mainstream media was reporting on the crime.
According to one of the articles, mainstream television press was trying to “naturalize a political coup and to ‘explain’ Marielle Franco’s murder” (“Respeitem a memória”, 2018), referring to the impeachment process of the former president Dilma Rousseff. The text went further to add that, not by chance, the city councillor’s execution was reported in a
“sensationalist fashion”, with journalists insisting on the narrative that she was a victim in an assault without context (“Respeitem a memória”, 2018). Considering how the ownership of media conglomerates in Brazil is concentrated in the hands of the power elites (Cabral, 2016; Barros, 2017), the website Nós, Mulheres da Periferia encouraged their readers to follow
22 alternative media outlets, as they were more likely to provide different perspectives and follow up on Marielle’s case more attentively: “in cases like these, it is vital to be aware of the kind of media that we read and trust” (“Nota de pesar”, 2018).
Brazil is structurally flawed
More than condemning the relationship between power and the people, the coverage of Marielle Franco’s execution by feminist, independent media criticized the foundations of a country with a history built over the “sweat, blood and bones of black and indigenous people who were enslaved” (Oliveira, 2018). In a nation structured in prejudice against minorities (Ferreira, 2019), not even “the brutal killing of a councilwoman who spoke against violence and police corruption can move the Brazilian society as a whole” (Lionço, 2019). In this sense, the cyberactivists manifested their concern over the political polarization that allowed the presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, at the time still not elected, and his electorate to reproduce a hate speech that banalized the tragedy and ignored racial issues.
In the view of the feminist outlets, the behaviour of Bolsonaro’s sympathizers could be compared to the nationalism conceptualized by Anderson (1991) that would put aside self-conscious ideologies to create an illusion of comradeship and uniformity that disregards the inequalities within their society.
Furthermore, the coverage pointed out that Brazil’s institutions are structurally flawed. With the “social tissue torn”, the government of Rio de Janeiro opted for a military
intervention in the favelas that risked the safety of the population instead of dealing with the problem through intersectional public policies (Ferreira, 2018). Meanwhile, a traditional left-wing “mostly ruled by a white middle class” (Cruz, 2018) continued to consider Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes’ deaths as a conjunctural fact.
23
Sense of community
The second sub-research question examined the extent in which the sense of community was fostered in the cyberactivist initiatives analysed. The repetition of slogans such as “Marielle is here” and “Marielle lives” throughout the coverage supports the claim that her death started a movement. It is important to note, however, that the same textual construction that praised Marielle for being an example for the population also sought to deconstruct the mythical understanding of her as a martyr, placing her as an equal instead. Not a “warrior” (Lisboa, 2019) stripped from humanity, but a human being within millions of Brazilian black women. This proximity promoted by the texts between Marielle Franco and the readers could be related to Brint’s (2001) notion of the sense of familiarity, which could be suggested by similar life experiences, social or cultural aspects.
The coverage by feminist media also evokes patterns of imagined communities in the sense that it uses an inclusive vocabulary that places women, regardless of their particularities – or subordinate intersectional identities – within the same group, paralleled to the nations described by Anderson (1991).
The texts considered that, amidst the mourning and protests following Marielle Franco’s execution, it was necessary to reflect upon what she represented and what “they wanted to silence” (Athayde, 2018). The aspects of community become more evident once you notice the us versus them narrative that permeates the coverage. Part of the texts
addressed the readers as members of the society responsible for her death – “you will not kill what Marielle stood for” (“Marielle Franco, 2018) – and, at the same time, as part of a community formed by those who shared her ideals – “or you will have to kill us all, and we are many” (“Marielle Franco, 2018).
This can also be tied up to Williams’ (as cited in Hall, 1993) notion of community being the process of communication, and is reflected in Marielle’s own slogan of campaign,
24 “I am because we are”, adopted by the media outlets in several examples of the corpus (Ponte Jornalismo, 2018; Paes, 2018; Silva, E., 2018).
Under these circumstances, “I am because we are” also became a place of shared grief and helplessness within this community of women for Marielle’s death. This feeling is
narrowed down in texts that discuss the loss of Marielle Franco from the perspective of black women. From this community forged in pain rises a community that cares for each other and preserves their own lives (Lisboa, 2019; Lionço, 2019). This is where the seed metaphor makes itself present once again: “We are strength that grows. We are roots. We will be flowers. We will fructify” (Ferreira, 2019).
The multidimensionality of the oppression in the features can also be connected to the notion of imagined communities. If we consider each of Marielle’s subordinate identity groups as an imagined community, the overlapping of these identities/communities may, as considered by Hall (1993), be repressive, in the sense that it also imposes a heavier load of oppressions that are characteristic of each group. Going a bit further, the very notion of belonging to several homes, therefore to no particular home (Hall, 1993), echoes the concept of intersectional invisibility (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008).
In this sense, the coverage not only establishes a uniform community among the women who grieved Marielle Franco and protested after her murder, but also promotes a sense of intersected and overlapped communities based on the subordinate identities to which authors and readers belong to.
This creates a perception of belonging that pervades the debate of empowerment of these communities, especially concerning black women. As said by Delanty (2003), communication ties and cultural structures have opened up possibilities of belonging to multiple groups. This, of course, includes minorities. However, to occupy their rightful place within the society, these minorities must transform it. Here, the feminist outlets’ discourse of
25 empowerment gained more passionate undertones, urging the members of these communities not to “back down or be silent” (“Marielle Franco, 2018) and legitimating their anger. After all, “in order to change the structures, we must not adapt to them” (Paes, 2018).
Mainstream versus feminist media
The third sub-research question investigated the differences in the coverage and community aspects raised by mainstream versus feminist, independent online media. Here, the characteristics of the cyberactivist media as initiatives that aspire to set the public agenda and combat inequalities (Ramalho & Maia, 2018; Silva & Christofoletti, 2018) becomes more prevalent.
Like in the example of feminist media, the manifestations following Marielle Franco’s murder were recurrently mentioned throughout the coverage by mainstream newspapers. The difference was the tone. While most of the texts from the independent outlets described the protests as a moment of communion and were written from a personal standpoint, by women who identified themselves with Marielle, the coverage from the mainstream media reported the facts on a drier note, except for the editorials.
An editorial published by Folha de S.Paulo raised the tone by underlining how the murder of the councilwoman “transcends the routine of daily atrocities” of the country to project itself as an “outcry against the barbary installed in sectors of the Brazilian society” (“Quem matou”, 2018). In this sense, the newspapers also contributed to the idea that Marielle Franco’s execution put her under a spotlight, setting in motion discussions about gender and race representativeness.
However, we see text constructions that are less evocative of community as the ones present in the coverage by feminist, independent media. Some of the aspects evoking
26 perspectives from the authors make the texts standardized, and community aspects more subtle. The sources used were also mostly institutional.
Pertaining the discourses present in the coverage, mainstream media also promoted Marielle Franco’s intersecting identities. One of the texts highlighted how being “from the favela” (Diógenes, Godoy, Dolzan & Mengue, 2018) was one of the first identities given to the city councillor on the day that she was born. Other fundamental traits were assimilated posteriorly in life: being black and a woman. This example ties up to Butler (1988) and Collins’ (as cited in Shields, 2008) understanding of gender as a performance, alongside other identities that are claimed and practised, rather than just accepted.
Moreover, the newspapers asserted how Marielle was proud of her origins (Canônico, 2018) and valued the representativeness that she, being a public figure, offered to Brazilian women. While one of the texts affirmed how her campaign was based “on the triad gender, race and city” (Canônico, 2018), an editorial by Folha de S.Paulo stated that she “exerted her mandate in defence of the strata of society which she was a part of” (“Quem matou”, 2018). However, even though the fact that the councilwoman was born and raised at the favela of Maré was constantly remembered throughout the coverage, her place of birth was also classified as “one of the city’s most violent regions” (Rangel, Vettorazzo & Franco, 2018a, 2018b), evoking to the problems of public security faced by Rio de Janeiro and to the stereotype of the favelas as underprivileged neighbourhoods ruled by crime.
In comparison, the mainstream media’s coverage viewed the matter of violence in the favelas more as a structural problem than a matter of oppression against a peripheral
population, ignoring the societal aspects involved in the crimes rates. At the same time, the newspapers reproduced the discourse that the country’s structural flaws were the responsible for the problems in public security. The texts constantly highlighted the political and
27 servers and structure for the police officers to work properly (Rangel, Vettorazzo & Franco, 2018a).
The classification of violence problems as structural, instead of social, could also denote a sense of community in the mainstream coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder. However, differently from the feminist media, which evoked the existence of several overlapping communities based on individual identities, the newspapers follow Anderson’s (1991) understanding of imagined community as a nation, seeing Brazil as a homogeneous community with structural issues. However, this discourse can be problematic, in the sense that it disregards the notion of nation-states as ethnically hybrid, posed by Hall (1993), therefore ignoring the particularities of the individuals and the levels of oppression to which its own population is subjected.
Furthermore, the reporting of mainstream outlets was characterized by other three theoretical codes: attack on democracy, political tensions and the investigation is not over.
Attack on democracy
While the mainstream coverage almost did not display traces of the relationship between power versus the people, except for eventual quotes where the interviewees would denounce the predatory power exerted by the police in the favelas (Cariello & Romeo, 2018b), the newspapers opted to report on Marielle’s case using the discourse that the crime was an attack on democracy (Chade, 2018; Grellet, 2018; Ouchana & Marinatto, 2018; Pennafort, 2018; Rangel, Vettorazzo & Franco, 2018a; Uribe & Boghossian, 2018). In this sense, the legislator was not murdered due to her challenge to power structures or intersected invisible identities (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), but because she was a political figure.
An editorial published by O Globo stated how Marielle’s murder was not just any crime among the homicides in Rio de Janeiro: it was an “attack to the democratic state,
28 considering she was a city councillor elected by popular vote” (“Apesar de”, 2020). In
interviews, authorities also highlighted how the crime could potentially harm the country’s institutions and democracy itself. However, the hypothesis was not initially accepted by all the media outlets analysed. An editorial by O Estado de S.Paulo published three days after Marielle Franco’s death criticized the exploitation of the “misfortune of others” by leftist authorities from the Workers Party “for political purposes” (“O assassínio”, 2018).
In a sharp tone that nourished Brazil’s political polarization, the newspaper declared that the attempt to classify the case as an attack on democracy, coming from “dissidents” in a dispute “against national institutions”, used Marielle as a pretext (“O assassínio”, 2018. The text added that until the inquiry was over, any suggestion that the crime had a political
undertone would be hasty. This stance did not last long. As the investigations moved forward, the newspaper also incorporated the attack on democracy narrative into the coverage of Marielle Franco’s case.
Political tensions
More than that, the legislator’s murder was also placed in the middle of the political tensions raised by the federal intervention. An editorial by Folha de S.Paulo declared that her execution happened during an “especially sensitive moment”, affirming that the fact that the councilwoman had consistently criticized the federal action could “fuel inevitable conspiracy theories” (“Quem matou, 2018) about her murder. Nonetheless, the conflicts stirred by Marielle Franco’s assassination were not restricted to the public security area. Another editorial, by O Estado de S.Paulo, criticized the language used by authorities when referring to the investigation of Marielle’ murder. According to the newspaper, giving the case “the outlines of a war” would only contribute to “the mood of animosity” (“O assassínio, 2018). As seen previously, the feminist outlets did quite the opposite.
29
The investigation is not over
The last discourse, present in both coverages of Marielle Franco’s murder, pertained to the investigations of the case. In feminist media, the recurring questions, made at every
milestone of the crime – 30 days, one year, two years – were the same: Who killed Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes? Who ordered their murders? And why? (“Marielle Franco”, 2018; Moreira, 2018b; Folego, 2019; Moreira & Oliveira, 2019; “Carta aberta”, 2020), which denoted the eagerness of the community formed by authors of the texts and readers in seeing the case solved, and a feeling of indignation due to the lack of answers and punishment for the culprits.
Compared to the mainstream newspapers, however, their coverage on the topic was scarce. The texts were more concerned with the discussion of the social implications of the execution than the actual development of the investigation. Nevertheless, soon after the legislator was murdered, one of the texts of the corpus criticized a speculation that Marielle Franco would be a scapegoat, killed to create a wave of terror in Rio de Janeiro, convincing the population about the urgency of the military intervention. If it was about that, “why it had to be a black body, like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr.?” (Pereira, 2018), questioned the piece, exposing the racial component that underlined her murder and evoking the discourse that turned Marielle into a martyr and a symbol.
The coverage of the investigation by mainstream media, on the other hand, was more prolific. Besides reporting on every new step of the inquiries, the newspapers also criticized how the case was being handled by the authorities. One editorial by O Globo stated that the arrests of the two former military police officers accused of the crime were an important step towards clarifying the murder. Yet, the text depicted that the inquiries were characterized by so many contradictions that the Federal Police had to join the case to “investigate the
30 investigation” (“Prisões são”, 2019). Another editorial uttered that the common objective of federal and state agencies should be the resolution of the crime: “There is no place for a war of egos” (“Apesar de”, 2020).
Conclusion and discussion
The execution of the councilwoman Marielle Franco alongside her driver, Anderson Gomes, stirred a national outrage with unforeseen social and political implications. As a rising political star that stood up for the disadvantaged, she was a beacon of hope that was extinguished too soon. Through the Critical Discourse Analysis of the coverage of her murder by feminist, independent online media and mainstream online newspapers, I have established that the coverage evoked a sense of community and belonging among the readers, especially Brazilian women, via the use of discourses that transformed Marielle Franco into a symbol of empowerment, representativeness, resistance and fight against oppression.
By actively celebrating the city councillor as a black, lesbian and peripheral woman, the feminist outlets have placed her as an equal, which infused in their readers a sense of identification with her. Marielle was also an authority figure who defied the status quo not only with her presence within the power structures, but with her militancy in favour of the minorities. As conceptualized by Brint (2001), communities are based in a sense of familiarity among people who are bound together by numerous factors, or even particular events. In this sense, the coverage of the councilwoman’s death evoked several overlapping communities, formed among women who felt represented by her in life and as a political figure; women who united in the face of the brutality of her murder and mourned her death; women who, like her, belonged to subordinate identity groups; women who shared her intersectional
31 In comparison, the discourses and language reminiscent of community were also present in the coverage of Marielle Franco’s murder by mainstream online newspapers, but in a more discreet tone, mainly through the voice of the sources. This could be explained by the nature of the media outlets, as the feminist media analysed displayed a cyberactivist character in its use of communication to offer different perspectives and articulate counter-hegemonic discourses (Matos, 2017). In fact, one interesting aspect of the contrast between the two coverages was the distrust shown by the independent outlets of the content reported by the mainstream newspapers. This could be linked to the discussion about the democratization of media ownership in Brazil, since the current configuration of the media system privileges political oligarchies and other powerful actors (Azevedo, 2006; Marinoni, 2015; Cabral, 2016; Barros, 2017).
The differences between both types of coverage became blatant once the relationships between power and the people were analysed. While the articles of feminist and independent media provided a layered reflection pertaining the multidimensionality of the oppression suffered by the minorities in Brazil – structured in a past rooted in genocide and slavery, and fuelled by a system that feeds on such inequalities, culminating in the murder of a
councilwoman who embodied all these oppressions – the mainstream coverage lacked in such discussions, merely exposing the flaws of the Brazilian structures, such as the violence in the favelas and political/economic crises, without contemplating where or how they were
originated. In this scenario, the murder of Marielle Franco became an attack on democracy, for her political status, and a conjunctural casualty.
In this sense, considering how power can be exerted through language (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000), and CDA is also about what is not being said, the discourses evoked by the mainstream coverage of the legislator’s murder can be linked to van Dijk’s (1993) notion of a “top-down relation of dominance” (p. 250), in which the newspapers end up reproducing the
32 speech of the elites who own them, which are not interested in losing their privileges. On the other hand, the communication adopted by the feminist, independent online media suggests a “bottom-up relation of resistance” (p. 250), where the outlets attempt to actively engage their readers towards empowerment and the defiance of the status quo.
Regarding the limitations of this qualitative study, due to the scope of this paper and the choice of examining the coverage of a particular event by specific media outlets, the findings are hardly generalizable. The feminist, independent and online character of some of the outlets analysed also limits the external validity of the research, as the results are not comparable or extendable. Concerning the subjectivity of CDA due to researcher-bias, pointed out by some scholars as a weakness of the method, I argue that my personal experience as a Brazilian non-white woman is actually one of the strengths of this study, when it comes to the recognition of patterns of community and the discussion of the levels of oppression faced by the Brazilian population.
As for further research, as the implications of Marielle Franco’s murder are still unfolding, scholars could benefit from interviews with activists or the expansion of the analysis to an experiment, considering not only the differences between the coverage and the discourses evoked, but the effects that this communication might have on the readers. The relationship between the coverage of the case and the sense of community that is constructed after tragedies would also be worth exploring. Beyond the case of Marielle Franco, studies could gain from an intersectional approach that challenges the notions of mainstream social structures, perhaps even extending the theories used in this paper to the analysis of minority movements throughout the world, in particular the intersectional ones, with the current example of the movement Black Lives Matter.
Nonetheless, this research provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on the implications of social changes to the status quo, the future of media and political
33 representation in general, and the role of cyberactivist initiatives in the shaping of a new communication that aims to empower the minorities and challenge the hegemonic narratives. The example set by Marielle Franco also leads to the necessity of an intersectional debate in politics that recognizes the system’s inequalities and works towards their end. If the election of more women in the power structures will be the answer to that, only time can tell. But, referring to the seed allegory present throughout this analysis, the sprouts are germinating. Through them, Marielle lives. Marielle is here.
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