Má! Maravilhosa! : lindas, louras e poderosas, o embelezamento da vilania na telenovela brasileira

Abstract

This study is to analyze the sophistication in the construction of the villains of the Brazilian telenovelas, their actions as well as the ways they show themselves. Nowadays, the wickedness seen in telenovelas is incorporated by a female character who presents an ideal of woman that arises as a result of feminist struggles and models of appearance that are established according to what is required by a historical-cultural and massive industrial trajectory of beauty and body. This work is a search to identify and understand such transformations of the figure of villains and the institutionalization of evil, not only from the construction of the story telling which relies on melodrama and on soap operas as fundamental cultural narratives, but also from the off-screen social context – sometimes political and economic - that explains and legitimizes these transformations. For this, it was realized a study in which our corpus is delimited from 1970 to 2015 and built a gallery of villains that gathers data from all telenovelas at 9 p.m. from TV Globo in this period, as well as their protagonists villains or linked to the protagonist center which were categorized as melodramatic or modern villains. We chose six villains for analysis - all built in telenovelas of TV Globo primetime - which brings together key data to achieve our objectives. Our look at them was guided and built from a reading that follows the path of melodrama transformations and narrative structures, the discussion and questioning about the ways of looking at the body and female beauty inserted in a context of political dispute about feminism and the sociohistorical perspective of investment in our practices to build an evil image associated to beauty and elegance which represents, in the villains, success in managing themselves.