Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Sentimental Education and Patriarchal Violence: A Critical Look at Latin American Melodramas
Mercedes Lucía Posada Meola
ABSTRACT:
When considering the representations that have contributed to the naturalization of patriarchal violence, one scene always comes to mind: a woman walking alone on a dark beach. A drunk man watches her, stalks her, harasses her, and finally rapes her. Sometimes the setting changes: there is no beach, but a dark street where a man, upon seeing a woman, feels entitled to possess her. What does not change is the violent intrusion into her body; what repeats is that this woman, brutally violated, ends up falling in love with her aggressor—an aggressor whom patriarchal society redeems, as seen in the telenovela Leonela (1983), where he is rewarded with an inheritance, a successful career, and the license to be unfaithful to his wife by virtue of his masculinity. This article is an excerpt from my doctoral thesis and, drawing from my own experience as a woman, it asks: In what ways have the representations of women in melodramas written by Delia Fiallo (the mother of telenovelas) mediated the reproduction of a sentimental education functional to patriarchy? To develop this study, Multi Modal Discourse Analysis (MDA) has been chosen, as it provides tools to integrate dialogues, images, and sound elements into a more comprehensive analysis of the construction of meaning in telenovelas (Latin American soap operas). It is expected that the results will offer a deeper understanding of the role of melodrama in our sentimental education and propose paths to emancipation by promoting alternative representations of love and diversity, contributing to the eradication of gender-based violence.
keywords: Patriarchal violence, Melodrama, Sentimental education, symbolic violence, gender stereotype