REPETITION-DIFFERENTIATION IN AN ONLINE DEBATE ON SEXUALITIES: RE-IMAGINING IDENTITY MEANINGS

Abstract

Semiotic Mobility on the WebIn 2014, Globo TV - the leading Brazilian TV network - aired Em familia, a primetime telenovela (soap opera) whose opening plot dealt with varied interwoven storylines on family drama, adultery, and love triangles, developed along mainstream heteronormative premises. In later episodes, however, the show started featuring the relationship between Clara - a simple bored married straight young woman, mother to an eight-year old boy - and Marina - a sensual successful lesbian photographer. The initial flirtation matured into a full blown love affair, leading Clara to disclose the infatuation to her family (parents, sisters, loving husband and son).The madly-in-love couple ended up taking center stage, a scheme which, in a country anchored in Catholic tradition such as Brazil, gave rise to a lot of controversy and heated responses, triggering both backlash and support concerning alternative family bonds. Some fans reacted not only against samesex pairing but also against the destruction of a happy family. Conversely, according to a whole lot of others, gay love was legitimate and the characters had the right to live it to the fullest; moreover, they demanded that the sexual innuendo between the two women be portrayed as explicitly as the intimate scenes involving the straight couples in the show were. Therefore, as Marina and Clara's relationship deepened and turned out to be quite steamy, many fans rooted for their bonding while others sided against it. Amidst these contrasting stances, a special concern gained ground: would a kiss between the two women be aired on a primetime program at a Brazilian television networ k? B eing ca st upon the audience, the doub t spar ked a ll sor t of speculation and dispute.A great part of that contention took place in digital environments (social networks, blogs, websit es and the like), producing Clara/Marina (Clarina) shippers1 and texts which proliferated on the web. The hashtag #clarina, different fanfics in Portuguese and English (All of me, Clarina day by day etc.), and the virtual campaign Globo makes Clarina happen are just some of the exa mples of how t he lesbian narrative beca me a vira l phenomenon, following transnational trajectories - a characteristic of the intense transit of semiotic artifacts which have been marking contemporary communicative landscapes. Everything concerning the production and consumption of cycles of discourse - ideas, texts, images, discourses, knowledges, and identities, for example - moves at unprecedented speed as semioticized commodities (Agha 2011; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). This escalating process, propelled by the development of not only Web 2.0 technologies but also media contexts in general (digital, televisual, and print), intensifies the identity-alterity dialectics, increasing the tension between known and alien meaning repertoires and, as a corollary, enhancing performances of surveillance and protection of perceived identity borders. Although violent language games are a very wellknown outcome of such kind of attrition, lea ding ver y oft en t o physical violence,2 they may, conversely, result in subverting conventional familiarities and/or shaking normalizing apparatuses (Butler 2004; Puar 2005; Lima 2014; Lewis et al. 2014; Moita-Lopes 2015) - as illustrated by the Clarina event above.In previous work I delved into such repetition-transformation activities concerning the negotiation of gendered cultural identities on the internet (Fabricio 2014; 2015). In this paper I shall explore the reification-dismantling of the heterosexual matrix in the cyberspace, by concentrating on the comments section of t he digital version of a popular Brazilia n newspaper, in which participants discuss the love affair between Clara and Marina. Upon approaching their online interaction, I examine how both replication and reorganization of heteronormativity coexist in that environment. In so doing, I seek to observe the pragmatics of iterability and probe the tension between repetition and renewal possibilities, proposing to take repetition-difference as an inseparable pair. …