Rural Territories Represented as Capixabas in a soap opera called Telenovela A Dona do Pedaço

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the representations of rural spaces in a soap opera called telenovela A Dona do Pedaço (2019). It is set in Espírito Santo, a territory in the Southeast of Brazil. During the screening, discussions arose about the capacity of the images to allude to that state and the settings used in its composition, located in the South of the country. Based on this assumption, through a survey and a text analysis published about the (soap opera) telenovela on the Capixaba portal A Gazeta, the “deterritorialization” of the story was identified, even in the production phase, motivated by aesthetic ideals. Based on the triad “paradise,” “hell,” and “purgatory” proposed by Fernando Cristóvão (1994), the meanings produced by the plot were identified. A dispute between the Matheus family and the Ramires family marked the beginning of the narrative. Their members were conditioned to conflict, describing the space as “hellish.” The state of the family changed to “purgatory” when the descendants of the Amadeu and Maria clans fell in love, but this did not last, and they returned to their previous state. This type of conception was considered outdated due to the new rural arrangements in vogue since the 1990s, when the plot began. At the end of the research, 48 Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) students provided questionnaires to discuss the territories imagined as Capixabas. These comments were qualitatively evaluated based on Stuart Hall’s (2016) approach, which included “mimetic” and “constructivist” perspectives. Although the majority expressed a “mimetic” perspective, the students quantitatively confirmed the rural images in A Dona do Pedaço (2019), indicating that these images could represent the state in which they reside.