Representação feminina de gênero no Sitcom Friends

Abstract

This paper intends to investigate in which way the three main female characters of the series Friends are represented, throughout the ten seasons of the plot, in relation to the figure of the woman in the media. The series is a sitcom that was aired on NBC television between 1994 and 2004 and portrays the lives of 6 friends who live in New York, United States. The plot takes place in two apartments in which the characters live and in a coffe house, portrayed as the main meeting point between them, with an emphasis on the love and professional life of the characters and how they deal with these situations. Considering that the empirical object of the research is an audiovisual product of great audience and the questions about the identity of the contemporary woman cover several perspectives of study, we looked for, initially, to realize a panorama of how the historical construction of the woman in the television and from concepts connected to cultural studies such as identity, female media representations, feminist waves and gender. Thus, in order to recognize the subjects presented in the media product in question, the concepts raised by cultural materialism associated with the cultural analysis of Williams (2003), which helps us to understand the culture, its unfolding and methodologies . For this, the textual analysis of Casetti and Chio (1999) is used in order to cover all the objectives mentioned initially in this work. Given this, we find that Friends portrays characters differently from the one we are used to seeing in the hegemonic media: they have life goals that go far beyond just marrying the ideal husband and forming a family, escaping from the normally presented female stereotype and widely disseminated. Thus, because it is an internationally known program, it reaches countless people, helping them not to follow the normative standards imposed by society and the media.