Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Women in Latin American fotonovelas: from Cinderella to Mata Hari

1980; Pergamon Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0148-0685(80)92700-1

1878-2760

Cornelia Butler Flora,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

The Fotonovela is a series of still photographs with balloon captions, telling, usually in 30 pages, a complete romance. Its evolution as a separate genre of women's literature is related to the changing definition of women's world for working-class Latin Americans. The shift in the locus of production and the way it is structured nationally and internationally relate to potential profits and magazine content. Audiences have been growing to include men, which on the one hand unites men's and women's worlds, but on the other sharpens some negative female images, especially those related to sex and violence. Emerging from the Cinderella theme of the 1960s, two distinct types of fotonovelas are identified in the late 1970s: the novels suave, with middle-class pretentions stressing salvation through consumption, and the novela roja, with working-class characters, explicit sex and violence, and a social disintegration focus. The implications of these for women's passivity in various spheres is discussed.