O autocuidado na tela do Bem Estar: o risco em saúde e o diálogo do programa com a sua audiência

Abstract

This thesis investigates the healthy life discourse, a hallmark of our time, from within the daily morning television show Bem Estar. The purpose of this research is to identify how the established discourse of health risk is transcoded in the dialogue between the television program and its audience. To understand how health has become a higher value in the western world, we discuss the medicalization of life and the discovery of risk factors that, in contemporary times, have become the parameters that determine whether we are sick or almost sick. The television is considered an analytic of government, that is, a resource that provides guidance to the viewer so that he can manage his daily life and that of the family. For such, this research is based on the concepts of governmentality and cultural technology developed by Foucault´s followers who consider doctors and paramedical professionals to be the somatic experts central actors within advanced liberal democracies in the art of governing others and ourselves. The methodological design is based on the Addressing Modes, which emerged from the film analysis and has been in use since the 1980s to interpret the way television programs build their relationship with viewers. We present three discourse insertion modes. One is the ever-haunting hazard addressing mode. In it the discourse of fear and that of hope attempt to persuade the viewer to adopt a healthy lifestyle in order to shape an uncertain future. Another mode is the self-care, in which the freedom and choice discourse legitimates the individual responsibility for the health conditions of the viewer. The last one is the instructional addressing, in which tutorials and step-by-step guidance can awaken in the viewers pleasure in learning to manage their health on a daily basis. We conclude that television reinvents itself. Firstly, because it addresses a thematic appreciated by viewers and its day-to-day applicability values the program itself. Then, because it stimulates the viewer to consume information as a rational response to the conduct of one's own life, that must be managed as if it were a kind of company. Finally, television reinvents itself because it stimulates self-vigilance techniques in each of us, contributing to government, at a distance, through the motivation, vigilance and self-improvement discourse.