Pode um LGBTQIA+ ser super-herói no Brasil? Ciberacontecimentos pop e a guerra semiótica sobre gênero e sexualidade na cultura nerd

Abstract

The thesis aims to understand how pop cyberevents that are mobilized by the semiotic war involving gender and sexuality in geek culture are constituted. In the course of the study, dialogues are also proposed between semiotics, more specifically the semiotics of culture, pop culture and studies of gender and sexuality. This effort is intended to demonstrate the contribution of semiotics to the study of these phenomena. For the purposes of a systematic and in-depth analysis, a specific case of the cyberevents mapped in the thesis was selected: the attempt to censor the comic Vingadores: A Cruzada das Crianças at the Bienal of Rio de Janeiro in 2019. The first chapter contextualizes the problem and objectives , unfolding the epistemological lenses of semiotics that are the basis of the research. The second chapter presents the concept of cyberevent, relating it to digital platforms from the perspective of semiotic territorialities, and builds a semiotics of pop culture, in which some paths from the semiosphere are delimited to understand nerd culture and super adventure. Categories of pop cyberevents are also developed: famous performances, fan mobilizations, anti-fans and haters mobilizations, public inspection, actions of the cultural industries, memetizations, pop metacyberevents. The third chapter builds a semiosphere of gender and sexuality, in which the position of a sign helps to understand its qualitative degree of semiodiversity, and demonstrates how the relationships around it are present in cyberevents, in geek culture and in superadventure. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the cases that were mapped and contributed methodologically to the characterization of the phenomena examined. Most of them are characterized as cyberevents that involve the inspection of the public, the superadventure – superheroines and superheroes –, are related to LGBTQIA+ people, are closed in relation to diversity, use hateful comments and multiple strategies of conservative and far-right, and are mobilized by LGBTQIA+ representations. The fifth chapter analyzes the semiosis that originated the selected cyberevent. For this, the meanings about gender and sexuality present in the plot of the media object put under discussion, the inaugural force of the cyberevent, the journalistic coverage around it and the constellations of meanings that it generated on Twitter are constructed and examined. Thus, chapter 6 articulates all the clues and inferences of what I called semiotic and queer cartography, classifying phenomena that are typical of the context studied, such as the idea that children are threatened, the engendering between nerds and the extreme right and the relationship of superheroes with masculinities. Enthusiastic ways of diversity are also proposed to overcome the studied war, such as the pedagogical use of pop in relation to gender and sexuality. Finally, nerd culture is highlighted as a territory in constant dispute of meanings, as well as childhood.