The aesthetics of poverty and crime on Argentinean reality television

PARDO, MARÍA LAURA

The Discourse of Reality Television

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Hampshire; Año: 2013; p. 115 - 140

The present paper forms part of a larger research programme into the discourse of extreme poverty in Latin America (cf. publications by the REDLAD network and Pardo, 2008c; 2008d; 2010a, 2010b). It examines the relationship that is constructed in the Argentinean reality show Policías en acción (Cops in action) between extreme poverty and criminality (cf. also Lorenzo-Dus, 2009, Pardo, 2008b). The corpus comprises all the episodes of Policías en acción broadcast in 2007. These episodes are examined through a qualitative methodology (Pardo, 2008a; Shi-xu, 2009) and within a critical discourse analysis framework (García Da Silva, 2007; Pardo Abril, 2007; Montecino, 2009; Pardo, 2008a; Ortiz y Pardo, 2008). The latter specifically draws upon three critical linguistic theories, namely "synchronic-diachronic textual analysis" (Pardo, 2008a), "information hierarchy" (Pardo, 1996) and "tonalisation" (Lavandera, 1984; Pardo 1996, 2010). The results confirm the presence in the data of practices of aestheticisation and spectacularisation of poverty. Such practices represent trends on Argentinean television more widely and are indeed characteristic of the discourse of postmodernity (Arfuch, 2002; Castro, 2002). The results also reveal how discursive fragmentation another feature of postmodernity leads to both particular ways of presenting hierarchies of information and highlighting certain semantic-discursive categories in the reality shows under examination. The combined effect of these discursive practices is the systematic construction of people living in extreme poverty in these programmes through a range of highly stigmatising traits, principally drug abuse, violence, alcoholism and madness.