Persistence of male domination: bovarism and doramas

Abstract

This article looks at the concept of bovarism (coined by Jules de Gaultier on the basis of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) as a key to analyzing the status of women in and out of fiction. The corpus to be observed are the doramas (East Asian serialized television productions), exemplified by the narrative Hana Yori Dango – a Japanese manga adapted for various audiovisual productions. The aim is to investigate the permanence of discourses constituting male domination, both in canonical works and in objects from the cultural entertainment industry. The study is carried out from a comparative perspective, using the concept of bovarism as a key to reading. The main references for the study are Pierre Bourdieu’s Male Domination: the Female Condition and Symbolic Violence (2014) and Valeska Zanello’s Mental Health, Gender and Devices: Culture and Processes of Subjectivation (2018). Other important references are Saffioti (2015); Kehl (2008); Adorno (2020) and Adorno e Horkheimer (1985). The results showed that themes relating to male symbolic domination in society and the social roles assigned to each of the sexes were maintained.