Gay Marriage and Homoaffective Union: a terminological analysis of the social values of libraries as a source for an ethical subject representation and dissemination in Brazil

Abstract

The issue of politically correctness in the representation and link of information, especially in mass media and popular science media, is becoming an ever-increasing concern due to the need to protect the rights of the diversity of citizens. In this vein, new terms are being coined in this social reality – and reflected in the bibliographic universe - to represent new and different realities in a more inclusive way (Pinho, 2010).

In the case of Brazil, the legal community is using with increasing frequency the term Homoaffective Union to represent the situations of cohabitation of same-sex couples, that can even generate common rights, seeking to expand the discussion on homosexuality into the context of homoaffectivity. On a more popular level, this situation is being described as Gay Marriage. Considering the important role of librarians, in the analysis and representation of subjects as a transcultural activity of mediation of information (Garcia Gutierrez, 2002) which reflects a cultural warrant (Beghtol, 2002, 2005) and a power to name (Olson, 2002), it seems necessary to adopt an ethical approach to this issue, since it is related to values and it can serve for both the inclusion and exclusion of communities of users. However, the question remains: to what extent indexing languages, as tools used for this mediating activity, allow an appropriate and inclusive representation of this topic while also ensuring precision in the information retrieval by the user.

For this, we analyzed the incidence of the terms...