Representações culturais da sexualidade na mídia: uma leitura de Lana Winters em American Horror Story: Asylum"

Abstract

This monograph investigates the representations of dissident sexuality and mechanisms of social control within the context of media culture, focusing on the character Lana Winters in the second season of the series American Horror Story: Asylum. Set in a 1960s psychiatric hospital, the narrative dramatizes institutional violence against individuals who defy gender and sexual norms, highlighting repressive practices such as aversion therapy and electroshock. The research aims to understand how audiovisual language can both reinforce and challenge normative discourses. This is a qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive study, grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Stuart Hall. The methodology involves film analysis, supported by selected frames and a critical-interpretative approach. The results suggest that Asylum merges aesthetics and politics by portraying lesbian sexuality as a symbolic battlefield, exposing institutional strategies of erasure and resistance. The study concludes that, although embedded in the logic of the culture industry, the series opens space for contestation by giving visibility to marginalized identities and denouncing historically legitimized power devices.