RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE IN CARTOONS: DIALOGIC POSSIBILITIES

POSSIBILIDADES DIALÓGICAS

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes, from the dialogical perspective of the Bakhtin Circle, the materialization of religious discourse in cartoons, considering them as concrete utterances that establish a tense and polyphonic dialogue among different social voices.

Thus, the study’s corpus consists of two cartoons that critically and evaluatively address the religious standpoint in relation to issues of public interest, which reveals disputes over meaning and ideological tensions. The theoretical and methodological reflection is grounded in the Dialogic Theory of Language (DTL), especially in the concepts of utterance, dialogism, and discourse genre, articulated with studies on religious and theological discourse. Methodologically, this is a documentary research (Fontana; Pereira, 2023) with a qualitative approach (Chizzotti, 2006). The results of the analysis indicate that religious discourse, by reflecting and refracting a Christian worldview, constitutes itself as an arena of axiological struggles, in which individual voices, imbued with divine authority, seek to legitimize particular perspectives and influence the interpretation of interlocutors. This may suggest that the cartoons bring together different voices and perspectives that are shaped by experiences stemming both from discursive universalization and from decentralization processes embedded in non-official, yet socially situated, contexts. The cartoons are configured as a discursive genre, enabling the circulation of multiple voices and values, the confrontation between official discourse and non-hegemonic social voices, thus highlighting the complexity and heterogeneity of meaning construction within the contemporary religious and social spheres.