Da música ao silêncio: identitarismo prescritivo e a vigilância da representação em Emilia Pérez

Abstract

This research investigates the symbolic, political, and discursive disputes that emerged around the film Emilia Pérez (2024), directed by Jacques Audiard, analyzing how the work was quickly placed at the center of controversies over representation, identity, and cultural legitimacy, being labeled by parts of digital criticism and activist journalism as a "transphobic," "xenophobic," and "racist" work. Instead of taking such accusations as an interpretive starting point, this study proposes to understand them as symptoms of a contemporary reception regime marked by normative identity expectations and moral surveillance, which traverse the cultural field and reorganize the criteria of art legibility. To understand this phenomenon, I developed the concept of prescriptive identitarianism (FRASER, 1995, 2000; BROWN, 1995; HAIDER, 2018; RANCIÈRE, 2009; MONDZAIN, 2013, 2017) as a theoretical-methodological operator intended to describe the set of normative expectations that regulate who can narrate the stories of marginalized subjects (SPIVAK, 2010), which affects are considered legitimate, and which representations are authorized as politically acceptable within contemporary cultural debate. Next, I employ a mixed methodology in the process of analyzing the research corpus: 1. I use a critical-discursive approach supported by the method of critical narrative analysis (MOTTA, 2013), combined with the framing of the linguistic resource of irony as an operator of interpretive communities (HUTCHEON, 2000) and the model of interactional participation (GOFFMAN, 1986), allowing mapping of address mechanisms, symbolic belonging, and production of interpretive consensus; and 2. I make use of diagrams as an analytical resource derived from information design. (BONSIEPE, 2011; WARE, 2012; TUFTE, 2007), allowing the visualization of evaluative and semantic patterns in the analyzed content. The analysis of the five international reviews included in the research corpus (Autostraddle, THEM, CBC Arts, The Pink News, and El País) reveals rhetorical and affective convergences that support the public canceling process of the film, understood here as a media practice inserted in a contemporary moral economy (MISKOLCI, 2025) and articulated with the dynamics of the new digital public space (BOSCO, 2017). The Emilia Pérez case thus emerges as a paradigm for understanding new forms of symbolic policing that affect artistic works addressing social minorities, revealing a contemporary crisis of perception (MONDZAIN, 2013), in which aesthetic ambiguity and dissent tend to be subordinated to moral regimes of visibility and identity correction.