Mídia, gênero e feminilidade : representações do protagonismo feminino nas telenovelas das 21 horas da Rede Globo de Televisão na década de 2010

Abstract

One of the main products of the entertainment industry, the Brazilian telenovelas are consolidated in Brazilian daily life. Fictional narratives have been present on national television since its inauguration in the 1950s, and, together with television news, television serials form the basis of the programming of the main broadcasters – especially the largest broadcaster in the country, Rede Globo de Televisão. By showing, almost daily, an example of what everyday life would be like in Brazilian society, Brazilian telenovelas present models of identities and the values of our society. Thinking about this correlation between fictional plots and social life, we seek, in this work, to problematize how such representations permeate the social imaginary and how they also affect the construction of an ideal type of femininity, based on the question problem: What representations of women and of femininity emerge from the protagonists of the 9 pm telenovelas on Rede Globo de Televisão that aired during the 2010s? The research covered a corpus made up of 26 characters analyzed in 19 new Brazilian telenovelas. For the analysis, we associated two methodologies for analyzing soap operas/audiovisual: “screen ethnography”, anchored in the work developed by Rial (2004), associating ethnographic data collection tools, their contextualization with social time and “diving”. in the chapters; and the election of “narrative events”, proposed by Rocha (2016), choosing narrative events that mobilize the development of the story. The study proposed a perspective relating the communicational product, the representation of the feminine from these characters and social life. The analysis starts from the values that emerge from these representations and that reveal what is valued in these women and in female representations. Based on the representations, we chose five major values that were divided into theoretical-analytical chapters, namely: beauty, work, race and class, motherhood and love. Some values are linked to the social place of these women, while others are related to the performativity of the feminine that were identified in these protagonists. In each chapter, we sought to develop a dialogue between current literature regarding these axes of analysis and the representations of these characters.