Formações discursivas sobre homossexualidade em telenovelas brasileiras

Abstract

By cultural industry is meant the set of means of production and reproduction from which the work of art, its conceptual design and artistic value are corrupted in the form of merchandise. On the other hand, studying mass culture requires scrutinizing its hybridization with aspects of popular culture and with the sociability relationships of each socio-historical context. In the history of Brazilian television, the novel is a very popular product, which acquired its own characteristics as a television genre. Since the 1970s, Brazilian telenovelas have incorporated a series of homosexual characters, who have undergone successive transformations. At first, homosexual characters were presented mostly stereotypically and carically, as effeminate and affected men, who played a comic and secondary role in the narrative. Subsequently, they began to occupy positions of greater prominence in the narrative plot and to present characteristics identified by the norms of gender as masculinized, in addition to seeking monogamous ties. Queer studies offer an instigating theoretical-critical resource for discussing these representations and changes in the figure of the homosexual, portrayed by Brazilian teledramaturgy, as they challenge the coherence and stability of the subject as "bearer" of a "sexual orientation", such as the flat characters of telenovelas perform. In considering these assumptions, as well as the relevance of performing a critical analysis of the ways in which homosexuality has been historically treated in the main product of the Brazilian cultural industry, the present study aimed to analyze the discursive formations on homosexuality in Brazilian telenovelas, noble, from its articulation with cultural, social and historical matrices. For that, a qualitative research was carried out and criteria were established for composition of the corpus from scenes of three telenovelas of the decade of 2010 that had gay characters throughout the plot, as well as news stories about each plot in websites, magazines and newspapers at the time of its exhibition. The selected scenes have been translated. The data were analyzed according to the theoretical framework of queer studies, cultural studies, as well as the literature on the area of communication about telenovelas. Based on the statements on homosexuality present in the corpus, caricature profiles of the characters that served as the basis for delimiting the discursive formations on homosexuality in light of the social, historical and cultural matrices were established. Four descriptive categories of the discursive formations on homosexuality present in telenovelas were elaborated, namely: comedy and morality, closet and hegemony, affective relations and familiar relations. The presence of homosexuality in Brazilian theater in the last decades has its relevance for allowing visibility and stimulating the public debate on the subject. On the other hand, the critical analysis showed that the representation of gay characters in novels is problematic, since it relies heav...