Social imaginaries and construction of discursive identities of executive secretaries in fiction

This paper considers how the discursive identities of the secretarial characters are constructed in the short story "Caso de Secretaria", by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and in the song "Secretaria", by Amado Batista. The main objective of this research is to unveil how the evoked social imaginaries favor the construction of stereotyped identities in which the professional secretary is subordinated because of her social gender. In this context, we seek to understand the relationships established between social imaginaries and discursive identities of the characters, and the ways in which the enunciating subjects relate to the alterities that constitute them. The methodology adopted was qualitative, through a discursive and interpretative approach, in order to consider the sociocultural contexts in which the discourses were produced. The theoretical assumptions of Bernardino and Nunes (2013), Camargo (2021), Charaudeau (2017), Sabino and Bezerra (2019) served as the main reference for the development of the analyses exposed throughout this research. The results point out that the construction of stereotypical discursive identities is directly linked to social imaginaries that reinforce stigmas and the subalternization of the secretary and the woman in organizational spheres.