Unboxing Pandora: O Imaginário sobre O Universo Feminino das Influenciadoras Digitais Brasileiras

Resumo (EN)

The present research deals with the reverberations of the mythical symbolic contents of the Greek goddesses in the construction of the Brazilian digital influencers' imaginary, in a context in which these Digital Influencers achieved great social visibility and great commercial impact. A large number of companies invested high sums in influencer’s images built inside YouTube´s digital environment and, later, on Instagram´s. The mains goal was to understand how influencers used the ancient archetypes of Greek goddesses and reconfigured them as market stereotypes. The specific goal was the analysis of each type of channel, listing the archetypal traits of the Greek goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis. Meanings were appropriated and reduced to an ideological interpretation used to sell products and spread a narrative about the feminine that is not in related with mythology or with studies about the cultural imaginary. From this central hypothesis, we witnessed that the enormous success of these digital influencers is partly due to the strong presence of the symbolic contents, more specifically the myths of the Greek goddesses. This generates an easy identification with their followers and consequently a strong symbolic adhesion, later converted into profit. The method used was the internet research between the years 2018 and 2020, analyzing the channels’s metrics, the channel content, the influencers’s posts on beauty and health / fitness and whether they migrated to an Instagram platform and their channel contents. This work is part of a series of studies about the relations between Media and Imaginary developed by the Media Research Group and Studies of the Imaginary of UNIP. Its conceptual basis to approach the imaginary is Edgar Morin’s notion of Noosphere (2007) and the anthropological paths of the Imaginary, as well as Malena Contrera's concept of Mediosphere (2010). In this sense, it is inserted in the studies that deal with the intersections between Media and Myth.