Protagonismo da classe C na avenida chamada Brasil: representações, enquadramentos e empoderamentos da realidade na ficção da telenovela

Abstract

How can we understand soap operas as devices capable of enhancing and creating a new framing that presents the lower class in everyday situations, in a way that transforms the symbolic imagery of the characters that represent this class into socially empowered individuals? This is the main question of this research. Searching for the answer, our overall objective is to promote a historical rescue, identifying television and its flagship product, the soap opera, as a device able to frame and represent social distinctions. We are seeking to understand this question through our empirical subject, the soap opera Avenida Brasil. Produced originally and displayed in Brazil by Globo TV in 2012, we sought to understand whether this soap opera was able to promote the empowerment of the lower class, that is, to motivate this class into an articulation of interests in order to fully achieve citizenship rights and influence government actions in support of their claims. The methodology used in the investigation of this empirical subject, based on a casestudy, was constructed from three concepts: framing, representation and empowerment. Our corpus consisted of 31 episodes from the soap opera, which were analyzed through six listed frameworks, being: housing, meals, work, money, intimacy and family, for the discussion of social distinctions within the television frame. In each of these frames, we show the angles of class distinctions, qualitatively highlighting different behaviors and the character profiles in different settings of the soap opera, trying to understand if Avenida Brasil even is a device capable of representing the point of view of the lower class. Our conclusion points to the success of the soap opera in promoting many class framings and forms of representation, but also proves the inefficiency to empower the lower class through the researched subject.