This thesis studies female characters considered popular in two telenovelas by João Emanuel Carneiro, directed by Amora Mautner, Avenida Brasil (2012) and A Regra do Jogo (2015/2016). Both were shown on Rede Globo at 9 pm. We consider as popular the characters that represent women of the working class (ANTUNES, 2001), that is, that sell their work directly or indirectly, and that present the habitus and the cultural capital (BOURDIEU, 2007) of the popular class. The objective was to analyze how these characters are constructed in discursive and televisual terms, in the face of a circulating discourse (CHARAUDEAU, 2012) regarding popular women in Brazil. In the face of this objective, the work was organized on two main axes: (1) the history and the formation of a discourse on poor and urban women in the country (SOIHET, 2015, FONSECA, 2015, RAGO, 2015 also in Hall's concept of representation ( 2016); (2) the construction of the character of television fiction, the particularities of telenovela characters and the realization of a typology of the popular female character in the plots studied. The analyzes consisted in the survey of the main physical, psychological and social characteristics of the characters, in the accomplishment of typologies and in the study of each of them, 28 in total, based on the content plane and the plane of expression and their respective forms and substances, according to the theory of Hjelmslev (GREIMAS, 1973;FONTANILLE, 2008;VOLLI, 2007). The focus of the analysis was on the construction of a televisual discourse which is embodied through formative and aesthetic questions not only of the television medium, but also of cultural matrices and industrial formats that compose the technicality of Martín-Barbero's mediation map ( 2009) and part of the mediatization. The methodology employed tools of discourse analysis, Bakhtin's language studies (1999; 2003; 2010) and semiotics to encompass the complexity of character building in these telenovelas as a form and cultural product. Throughout the analysis, it was observed that the space-time characterization of the characters was shown as a key element for its construction and, using the concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 2010), were found four types in the characters: the adventure chronotope, the idyllic, the third in private life and the trivial. The characters were divided into workers and emerging social and in the following typologies: matriarch, maintainer, periguete, femme fatale upstart, best friends, mentors, chameleon, nemesis, villains, heroine, brave woman, melodramatic and religious girl. The same character held more than one classification.