Sex, soap, and society:telenovela noirin Álvaro Uribe's Colombia

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of the narconovela, a variant of the telenovela which emerged in Colombia in the 2000s, gaining huge audiences and dominating the ratings. Taking as its starting point the seminal work of Jesús Martín-Barbero in the 1980s and 90s, it examines the critical reaction to these sensationalist crime stories, questioning the common assumption that their popularity confirms a decline in the moral values of the viewing public. Drawing parallels with film noir, it notes how the pleasure taken in viewing melodramatic and dystopian fictions reveals a number of social tensions without implying that what is in any case a highly diverse audience approves of what it sees on screen. Rather, it understands the narconovela as a dramatisation of the darkest aspects of Colombian common sense which is interpreted in different ways by different social subjects. As part of the argument, it provides a detailed analysis of Sin tetas no hay paraíso, the series which inaugurated the new subgenre, and concludes with the consideration of two small viewer surveys.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.