Melodrama y escándalo de madre. Relatos biográficos sobre celebridades en el periodismo de espectáculos y chimentos

From multiple stories about the intimate lives of female celebrities, entertainment journalism constructs evaluations and judgments about emotions and behaviors that fuel cultural perceptions about motherhood. This article identifies two cultural frameworks involved in the journalistic narrative of entertainment and celebrity coverage —melodrama and scandal—, and analyzes their articulation in the biographical production about famous mothers that proliferates in magazines, TV shows, and platforms dedicated to celebrity news. Embedded in the tradition of discourse criticism, the work investigates the staging of melodramas and scandals in the journalistic construction of six stories linked to motherhood involving different famous Argentine women. From the analysis of different sources that threaded those stories, a moral rhetoric is observed, expressed by the complementary alternation between tales of misfortunes and maternal transgressions.