“Comenta aí! Deixa seu like!” : considerações em torno do ethos discursivo no contexto de uma “medicina estética instagramável"

Abstract

This research focuses on the ethos (MAINGUENEAU, 2008) that emerges from posts published on Instagram accounts owned by dermatologists and plastic surgeons. We consider the medical profile on Instagram, which is a technical object, as a midium (DEBRAY, 2000), that is, a vector and value filled with beliefs and ideas regarding physical appearance that aims at a formative matrix, the instagrammable aesthetic medicine, for the reason that we find the medical profile on Instagram as a digital device many specialists in the field of aesthetic health medicine use to advertise beauty as a desirable product to be consumed. The unethical behavior of some specialists in the digital world, mainly on the so-called social networks, have raised concerns within the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery as well as the Brazilian Society of Dermatology in regard to this new way of medical advertising. The corpus assembled for this study, which was gathered from July 2019 to October 2020, is composed of 200 posts published on the feeds of 40 accounts owned by Brazilian plastic surgeons and dermatologists. Within the theoretical methodological framework of Discourse Analysis (DA), we mobilized the concept of ethos (MAINGUENEAU, 2008; 2008c; 2018a; 2018b; 2020) and identified in the scenographies from the medical Instagram profiles the crucial semantic feature typical of the ethical world of the digital world, the world of the digital influencers: narcissism. To analyze this feature, we mobilized the notion of extimacy (PAVEAU, 2017), which contributed to the understanding of the midium itself in relation to the production of a narcissistic ethos that emerged from it.