ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how women perpetrators of crime are resemiotised in public discourses, focusing primarily on media narratives of sensational and serious cases, with particular attention to the Brazilian press. I argue that the semiotic resources which represent women criminals are most of the time associated with their gender and have therefore important cultural and political meanings. Crime stories, where sexualised women are represented as main characters, are a significant arena in which social conflict and discrimination are symbolically explored. I will discuss how the female characters are recontextualised in relation to their male counterparts and condemned visually and linguistically because they are women.
The analyses combine critical social semiotics and multimodal methodologies. I draw on images from newspapers and image banks and from the internet. I will also discuss lexical/textual labelling and their intermodal relations. In the visual data women are contextualised as transgressive actors or performing behaviours highly inappropriate for their ‘sex’. The textual data complements the multimodal analyses, providing further examples of stereotyping: women are often evaluated negatively and there is also strong textual evidence that trivialises, derogates, and consequently condemns them.
My conclusions point to processes of social devaluation: sexism is the pervasive and underlying ideology recurrent in these representations.
