“Eu sou môfí”: juventude periférica, indústria cultural e luta por reconhecimento

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes a moral conflict existing in the city of João Pessoa between the values disseminated by the local media and the production of a stigmatized identity in its attempt to fight for recognition. Therefore, adopting the social typology of the môfí in what constitutes it as a social production of a specific local category, this work seeks to analyze the moral meanings of the stigmatization of young blacks and young people from the periphery in the city. From a methodological pluralism, we sought to understand the daily production of values in their different levels of interaction with local media production, including social networks. To this end, the studies by Jessé Souza (2006; 2009) on sub-citizenship in Brazil served as a guiding discussion about the processes of evaluative hierarchy of the most impoverished groups in contemporary Brazil, due to their heuristic affinity with the classics of sociology, and, above all, with critical theory. In this way, the framework for problematizing Brazilian inequality was intended with a critical theory perspective on the cultural industry and the production of moral life. At the end of the work, the Honnethian theory about the struggle for recognition guided an analysis of the “traces” of a peripheral identity that seeks to dispute values with a hegemonic morality existing in the city. Thus, the sociological effort took place, first, in the understanding of the relationship between media and moral life and, later, in the verification of the existence of representation figures in social networks that seek, to a certain extent, to subvert the subjection promoted by television productions, configuring a struggle for moral recognition from a peripheral identity.