Woman’s Place is in Science: A Discursive Analysis of Comic Strips about Female Scientists

Abstract

For a long time, women were excluded from formal knowledge and prevented from exercising professions, such as scientists. Today, even with advances, they still face prejudices regarding their ability for science. This article has two objectives: it discusses the historical formation of stereotypes of the relationship between women and knowledge and it analyzes three comic strips dealing with women in science produced by the websites Quadrinhorama and Dragões da Garagem. The analysis is based on notions of discursive memory by Courtine (2009) and stereotypes by Amossy and Pierrot (2001), Burke (2017), and Allport (1979). It also mobilizes the discussion about the comic strip genre by Ramos (2017), and the discussion about the history of women by Perrot (2017) and Tosi (1998). The results show that the strips retake and refute stereotypes about femininity based on a discourse that women are less apt for science than men, in contrast to an alleged male ability for logical reasoning.

Keywords:
Stereotype; History of women; Discursive memory; Comic strip