Em busca de um leitor de fronteiras: representações e projeções identitárias da nova classe média brasileira nos jornais populares Super Notícia e Meia Hora

Abstract

This dissertation aims to distinguish representations and identity projections of the new C class on the popular newspapers' pages. It attempts to understand what identity discourses are being built, and which senses about this social group are circulating on the pages of these newspapers and in the Brazilian imagination. Over the past years, Brazil has witnessed the emergence of a new Brazilian middle class, resulting in particular from economic changes in the country. It enabled the social rise of 35 million Brazilians emerging from a situation of extreme social vulnerability to a new economic and social level. At the same time, we witness the expansion of popular printed newspapers that have the popular classes as preferred readers. Those people now have access to symbolic goods such as newspapers, whose elitist character - either by value or language, made them restricted to the most affluent society. In general, the popular newspapers prioritize delivery service, instant daily life, and entertainment of their preferred readers setting other criteria of newsworthiness. Based on the analysis of newspapers Meia Hora and Super Notícia, we seek to infer which identity representations about the new middle class are being forged according to Cultural Studies. This study understands the identity phenomenon as a phenomenon essentially symbolic with narrative and discursive construction. The background thread concerns a possible tension between representations that claims for a citizenship space to these individuals, or a representation that allows a substantially economic reading about this social phenomenon. The survey allowed us to realize that in a movement towards the new middle class, popular newspapers are becoming hybrid symbolic boundaries of an area that is still under construction. More than delimited representations, we find an attempt to engage dialogue with an interlocutor who is also moving.