“I DON’T FEEL MYSELF OUT OF AXIS, OUT OF PITCH, OUT OF NOTHING.”

ANALYSING IDENTITY CONSTRUCTIONS IN MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

This paper aims at approaching some questions about a comprehension of the notion of otherness in the process of identity construction (BUTLER, 2010). Although Cultural Studies consider social identities as a dynamic phenomena, fluid and heterogeneous, there is still a maintenance of social and cultural narrative, concerning that identities are essentialist, fundamentalist and fixed. It is realized that in debates and forms of comprehension of reality, there is a kind of silence concerning several forms of living and constitution of individuals as subjects in contemporary social life. There are some discursive representations in specific social practices and events in which they can be identified as potential devices. Such devices are concerned to people, beliefs, actions and construction of social relations. Thus, it is possible to identify in Laerte Coutinho’s answers some ideas developed by queer studies, mainly reflections and debates proposed by Judith Butler, to whom identity is provided by genre, cultural and socially constituted. It means identities are unstable and contigential, once sex is natural, because it is referred to biological differences between female and male, which are unchangeable.