A teoria crítica invade o covil da medusa: um olhar não petrificado sobre as webseries juvenis

Abstract

In recent years, humanity has faced a pandemic that has shaped new patterns of behavior, sociability and consumption of cultural products; this scenario has contributed to the expansion of streaming services. The way people have established understandings and comprehensions about the narratives of series, webseries, literature and art is shaped by the context of late capitalism. In light of this, the subject of this dissertation is contemporary webseries about school life, available on streaming services, and whose main characters are a specific group in society: teenagers and young people between the ages of 13 and 19. Our analysis focused on Sex Education (2019-2023), Elite (2018-2024) and Young Royals (2021-2024) and took as its theoretical basis different contributions from historical and dialectical materialism and Marxist traditions; it discussed, in particular, the ethical aspects (crossed by social, sexual and political relations) of the human relationships that are established in these audiovisual fictional creations whose action takes place in school space-time, focusing on the issue of human formation. As a result of the research, it was concluded that there is a semi-formative media pedagogy administered by ideological content - aligned with the anti-democratic conservative agendas of the neoliberal political agendas - which obliterates social antagonisms through the fetishization of technology; the excitation of the senses; the pathologizing discourse of psychosocial dysfunction; and spectacularization, leading, in short, to the one-dimensionality of youth in formation