“Olha eu chorando e dando porrada na mesa”: cultural consumption and normalized violence against women in Sertanejo song lyrics

Abstract

This article seeks to understand how the cultural consumption of sertanejo music contributes to the perpetuation of normalized violence against women. To this end, it adopts three theoretical perspectives that prove to be useful in understanding the phenomenon: a) an understanding that takes industry consumption as the creator of relationships (Canclini, 1997); b) a problematization of the relationship between country industry and gender, in contemporary relational contexts (Esteban, 2007); and c) a reflection on the sertanejo music industry and emotions, from the perspective of Gumbrecht's (2010) aesthetic experience. Through a methodology inspired by the analysis of emotions proposed by Illouz (2009) and Esteban (2007), a corpus was selected with 6 (six) lyrics from 3 (three) artists, in order to observe how the cultural industry appropriates of emotions and transforms them into an object of consumption. The results indicate that violence against women, although present in the lyrics, is latent in the way they are consumed, especially based on certain rhythmic elements of presence, perpetuated by an industrial logic of the market. This latency prevents spaces from being opened for more in-depth discussions about such violence, in the context of contemporary consumer relations.