The collective need to be inside, the individual spectacle of the outer: Critical Discourse Analysis of the construction of discursive representations about transvestites on Argentinean television

What is it about?

The Argentinean transgender and transvestite associations are an important part of the country's large human rights movement. Argentinean transvestites have been and continue to be affected by discrimination and social exclusion. This article analyses how the way some Argentinean television programmes use language to talk about transgender people who fight for their rights can create images and representations that help to maintain the statu quo.

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Why is it important?

This article adopts a critical discourse analysis frame and specific analysis methods for studying discursive representations about transgender people, a combination that is very rare in the field of linguistics. This type of linguistic analysis, which is inductive and text-founded, provides concrete examples of the vital shaping role that language plays in social issues: how social representations, which have direct effects on the way people feel, think and act, are discursively constructed by powerful media.