Life crises in Brazilian self-help books

Considering the contemporary processes of denying aging, the variety of identity branding and the elevation of youth as a value, I propose an analysis as per how some life crises are portrayed in self-help books. Taking into account the images of the male and female wolves (lobos and lobas, in Portuguese) in order to characterize the midlife crises or forty-years-old-crises in Brazil, these constitute one of my analytical attentions. The effort is to capture the changes that the gender deviations bring to define the midlife in this particular kind of media. While men are seen as fragile and childish, women are seen as powerful and seductive, despite the physical transformations in this period of life. From the theoretical framework of sociology and anthropology of emotions and care, and the generation and life courses topics, I propose a debate on the socio-emotional expectations for this stage of life. Reinforcing, at the same time, risk and individual crises feelings, and family and traditional positions, Brazilian self-help literature constitute a rich field for sociology study, and part of this work looks at the possible social-cultural specificities in this context. Another topic of interest is the recent appearance of the so-called quarter-life crises in American self-help books for a cross-cultural comparison. This paper initiates a comparative analysis on the socio-cultural processes of construction of images and meanings for life crises in self-help literature, through the interplay of two analytical categories, gender and life courses, in different publishing and national-cultural contexts, as my doctorate graduation work aims to achieve.