"In Brazil it's a sin, you can't get old!"

axiological positions in the constitution of the polemic in online comments

Abstract

Aging in Brazilian society is a topic that attracts multiple perspectives and raises controversial positions, especially when it comes to female aging. Even though a growing number of public women, over 60 years of age, demonstrate the continuation of an active life, demonstrating the conquest of new spaces and changing the stereotypical concept of a mature woman, caregiver of the home and grandchildren, many issues are intertwined around ageism. Aware of the seriousness and breadth of this theme, we propose an analysis of the axiological positions found in the online comment discursive genre and their contribution to the establishment of the controversy. The corpus consists of comments collected on the Instagram platform, in a post from the page @grupocidadão190, from the Alto Oeste Potiguar/Rio Grande do Norte region, which broadcasts everyday and public news. Theoretically, the work is anchored in postulations from the Bakhtin Circle and the Theory of Argumentation in Discourse. The analysis shows that the comments are imbued with dissonant axiological positions, noticeable in the textual materiality, based on linguistic and semiotic resources, such as figures of speech, exclamations, emojis. Situated in disputes over meaning about "aging", the positions manifest argumentativeness and contribute to the construction of polemical discourse.