“Let's go to war”: the presence of the mobilizing discourse on dengue control campaigns

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present results of a research on advertising campaigns by the Secretaria de Estado de Saúde de Minas Gerais – SES-MG  (Minas Gerais Department of Health) that were broadcast on television to control dengue fever, observing how the idea of mobilization was used as a discursive strategy. The pictures were studied from the perspective of the new discourse analysis proposed by Charaudeau, who conceives the discourses as resulting from a two-way articulation between the situational and linguistic aspects. In this article, we analyze two films broadcast on TV by the years 2010 and 2014, which are constituent parts of the campaigns “Agora é Guerra – Todos contra Dengue” (Let's go to war - everybody against the dengue fever) and “Dengue – Ou a gente acaba com Ela ou Ela acaba com a gente” (Dengue fever - either we annihilate It or It annihilate us). We investigate and question the mobilizing discourse adopted, which brings visual, textual and sonorous references sending people to a war against a common enemy, as well as the hegemonic representations of gender on the campaigns.