O inacabamento identitário na série Euphoria: Jules e o feminino

Abstract

Over the course of time, countless attempts have been made to name, sculpt, classify, and diagnose femininity as a sign produced by patriarchal power. Obedient, fragile, delicate, modest, maternal, and pure are just a few of the many adjectives exhaustively employed to shape a category of feminine womanhood capable of integrating a social imaginary that has long questioned the autonomy of those whose bodies are traversed by the most violent discourses. In response, resistant/responsive activities have challenged traditional ways of saying womanhood, reconfiguring oppressive identity paradigms and opening space for alternative perceptions of femininity. In light of this, this master’s dissertation seeks to investigate, through Dialogic Discourse Analysis, how the feminine-identitarian construction of Jules unfolds in the television series Euphoria, and how this construction reflects and refracts patterns of behavior within youth culture. The corpus, composed of episodes from the first season (with emphasis on episode 4, Shook One Pt. II) and episode 2 (F*ck Anyone Who’s Not A Sea Blob) from the special selection, is converted into still frames and transcriptions in order to analyze the verbal, visual, and sonic dimensions of concrete utterances. The treatment of this material is grounded in a qualitativeinterpretive approach to the data, through dialogic juxtaposition, that is an investigative process that acknowledges the active role of the researcher, who is responsible for updating the meanings of the text based on their experience and their position as a historically determined subject. To the corpus, we apply the teachings of the Bakhtin Circle, specifically the principles of alterity and verbo-ideological forces, always departing from the dialogic relations of the utterance. This theoretical apparatus enables an analysis centered on the theme of belonging, from which three subcategories are proposed. The first, the self that does not belong, emerges from the dialogic juxtaposition of the character’s childhood, revealing that the transgender child experiences a severe identity crisis, largely due to non-belonging to a body of masculine performance, which leads to feelings of anger and frustration. The second, the self that belongs to the other, diagnoses an adolescent who is still highly immature and engaged in assembling a heteronormatively oriented feminine body, thereby reproducing stereotypes that are harmful to herself. The third, the self that belongs to itself, constitutes a stronger point of resistance in relation to the other categories, as it is marked by the character’s greater concern with her own desires, thus fostering, to some extent, greater empathy with trans feminine identity.