Brazilian ”soap-operas”, or telenovelas, are broadcast throughout Brazil six days a week during prime-time. Every day, they attract an audience of more than forty million viewers. They also attract millions of dollars of advertising revenue and promote a range of commodities and desires that are made available for You, the television viewer. These connections between telenovelas, commodities, and desires is the telenovela flow. This book is a study of that flow. It examines how the telenovela flow shapes, reinforces, or challenges the hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality and class that exist in contemporary Brazil.

Based on anthropological fieldwork in the city of Belo Horizonte, this book examines both the content of the telenovela flow and the way the flow and the way the flow addresses You, the viewer.

How does the telenovela flow invite You to interact with it? How might You respond? And what do those responses reveal about how Brazilians think of themselves and their society?