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Our study examines media representations of the so--called “new middle class” during the period 2008-2012, during which the public sphere overflowed with images of new lifestyles and futures as “previously poor” Brazi-lians were invited in national advertising campaigns and in mainstream journalistic accounts to view themselves as members of an ostensibly new demographic sector. Meanwhile, through television, films, and music, Brazi-lians were exposed to stories of socio-economic mobili-ty, usually tied to love, sex, and consumption. Through a detailed review of existing studies of representations in media and advertising campaigns, we reflect on recurring representational patterns, arguing their importance in the construction of new class subjectivities for popular-class Brazilians. Our article seeks to capture the intense discur-sive formations that flourished over a relatively short pe-riod of political and economic stability. 

This article presents an ethnographic account of an extended family from the north- eastern city of Recife, Brazil, during the months prior to the 2018 elections in which hard-right politician, Jair Bolsonaro, was elected to Brazil’s presidency. The family ex- emplifies the sector contentiously referred to as the “new middle class”—the estimated thirty-five million people who rose above the poverty line during fourteen years of rule by the left-leaning Workers’ Party, but whose prospects have since become precarious. Drawing from extended ethnographic fieldwork, I present a series of ethnographic moments, each illustrating how informal conversations about the coming elections both reflected and affected family dynamics. Emerging within these moments are narratives of moral disintegration, apparent nostalgia for Brazil’s 1964–85 military dictatorship, lost masculinities, menacing sexualities, and the regeneration of political “zombies.” I advance a series of theoretical claims about dimensions of the political affinities of Brazil’s “previously poor” that merit deeper ethnographic investigation.