The Performance and Reception of Televisual «Ugliness» in Yo soy Betty la fea

In 2001 a televisual cultural artifact from Colombia occupied the center of a transnational cultural dialogue, partially destabilizing the "narrations of viol-ence" that characterize local, national, and global constructions of the embattled South American nation. 1 The telenovela Yo soy Betty la fea [Betty], produced by Colombia's RCN television and written by Fernando Gaitán, became a mega hit and captured audiences in various Latin American and Spanish Caribbean nations. According to a Variety magazine report, Betty was broadcast in fifteen Western countries and had 80 million viewers in Latin America (Mary Sutter 2001). In the US Betty, which aired on Telemundo's network, captivated audi-ences in major cities such as New York and Miami and briefly challenged Univision's dominance in the US Spanish language television market (Michael Freeman 2002; Mimi Whitefield 2000). In both the US and in Latin America, audiences created Internet chat rooms in English and Spanish where foristas [women who participate in the forums] discussed the telenovela's narrative, character development, possible endings, and even embraced the Yo soy Betty la fea jargon. After witnessing Betty's success, Univision bought the rights to Betty's reruns in the US and co-produced a sequel with RCN titled EcoModa. Finally, for the first time in the history of US English language commercial television, a Latin American televisual concept might cross over to the US mainstream market. NBC acquired Betty's rights and planned to transform the telenovela genre into a culturally and commercially familiar US situation comedy (Mary Sutter and Josef Adalian 2001). 2 Betty is a product of globalization wherein the flow of audiovisual images transcends the local realm of signification, creating, as Nestor García Canclini argues, de-contextualized cultural and political histories (2001: 160). 3 However, Betty's transnational success should be examined both in terms of globalized commercial television exchanges and more importantly, in terms of the teleno-vela's thematic construction. In contrast to other televisual cultural products, Betty's main theme revolved around discourses of female "beauty" and "ugliness," depicting a principal character who might be considered the "ugliest" of all telenovela heroines. Betty's narrative re-articulated colonial, gen-dered, class, racial, and Eurocentric dominant discourses of female aesthetics, thus, creating a trans-cultural space for debates about socially constructed ideologies of "ugliness" and "womanhood." In view of its transnational success, one is prompted to ask, how did Latina, Latin American, and Spanish Caribbean women understand ideologies of female ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/03/010065-17  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1468077032000080130 66 Rivero physical "beauty" and "ugliness" in Betty? Were audiences mesmerized by the principal character (Beatriz) and her best friends el cuartel de las feas [the bunch of "ugly" women], because they identified with their marginality? This essay seeks to answer these questions by analyzing the ways in which Colombian, Colombian-American, Mexican, Mexican-American, and Puerto Rican women perceived Betty's construction of "beauty" and "ugliness." By establishing points of connection between Betty and some of its diverse audiences, this essay argues that Betty created a space for gender/cultural identification and provided a source of contestation regarding ideologies of female "beauty." In this essay I am not suggesting that as a cultural product, Betty was inherently emancipatory, or that the participants only produced counter-hege-monic readings. As Douglas Kellner (1995: 39) observes regarding media cultures and audiences, "a system of power and privilege conditions our pleasures so that we seek certain socially sanctioned pleasures and avoid others." In the case of Betty and the research participants, perceptions of "beauty" and "ugliness" operated between dominant, negotiating, and in some cases, oppositional meanings (Stuart Hall 1980). However, what was particularly evident in the participants' responses was the fact that regardless of the dominant dis-courses of gendered, racial, and class-based "beauty" presented in Betty, the text offered a space for mediation on the origins of female aesthetic categorizations and the ways in which the participants saw themselves as "women." To contextualize Betty and the audience study, I first examine the construction of female "beauty" and "ugliness" in the Latin American and US contexts. Then, I discuss the method used for the research, the selection of participants, and my personal attachment to the subject of study. A textual analysis of Betty follows, paying special attention to "ugliness" and el cuartel de las feas [the bunch of "ugly" women]. Finally, I examine audiences' readings of Betty's narrative. This section will focus on the participants' responses regarding the narrative's con-struction of female "beauty"/"ugliness" and the origins of these aesthetic classifications. I conclude the essay by positioning Betty's success as a product of the telenovela's thematic construction and as a possible result of audiences' desire for diverse themes and representations of "womanhood" in the telenovela genre.

Английский

Feminist Media Studies. – 2003. – Vol. 3, № 1. – P. 65–81.