Poverty, Illiteracy and Shame on the Brazilian Screen: Lessons from Dona Irene

Abstract

An important dimension of the pedagogical relationship is the way that the “uneducated” and “illiterate” subject is constructed. This provides motivation for the attainment of knowledge, qualifications and status that generate distance from this “disqualified” subject. The humiliation and shame of the subject who cannot or does not learn is reproduced in mediated form in television and cinema. This chapter identifies the social, historical, and geographical dynamics of the treatment of illiterate subjects in the Brazilian media, focusing on the racial and social stigmatization of North easterners as “backwards,” stupid and infantile. In so doing, the chapter adds to understandings of the social charge of mediated pedagogies in societies other than the Anglophone West, where theories of public and media pedagogies have been developed and, for the most part, applied. The theoretical framework builds on the concept of public pedagogy, connecting it to Bourdieu’s notion of pedagogical action as symbolic violence, in the context of a society characterized by high levels of educational inequality structured along racial and regional lines. The analysis focuses on The Lessons of Dona Irene, a segment of a regional comedy program featuring an ostensibly illiterate north-easterner humorously attempting to teach phonetics. Its humor lies in the subtle wit and wisdom of Irene, and its subversive quality in the lines of solidarity it builds amongst its poor and rural audience, against the Brazilian media establishment. The case of Dona Irene demonstrates the importance of interpreting media representations of pedagogical relations within distinctive contexts of production and reception, which, in Brazil, means taking into account both the relationship between education and other structures of social inequality, and the importance of the commercial media in legitimating these structures. The popularity of Dona Irene is significant precisely because of the wider media environment within which it is located, and from which it radically diverges.