Thematic representation of violence against women on fictional literature: analysis on bibliographical OPAC

Abstract

Women went through several clashes to obtain rights and still struggle to conquer their spaces. The participation of women in literature has increased, through which discussions are created about the role of women in society, as well as social problems related to the female gender. The struggle of women for representation permeates, among other obstacles, access to information. Thus, there is a need to adequately represent, on Online Public Access Catalogs, content of a social nature inherent to women. The objective was to outline a general overview of the thematic representation of fictional literature with violence against women in their narratives. From an exploratory perspective and under a quantitative-qualitative approach, a comparative analysis of the descriptors used in the indexing of the recovered books was developed. Data collection occurred in two steps: search for the term violence against women, in which, mostly, non-fictional books were recovered; and, search directly for the titles of fictional books, where it was found that most records do not have descriptors that indicate the violence present in their plots. It can be concluded that the thematic representation of fictional literature tends to be less exhaustive and specific in the analyzed catalogs, the improvement of the descriptors can avoid the silencing of contents that help in exhibition, characterization and identification of violence against women.