Embodying Modernity: Race and the Cultural Engineering of the Feminine Body in Brazil

Professor Daniel Silva, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, will give a talk as part of the 2016-17 Life of the Mind series.

This talk, part of a larger book-length project, explores the cultural construction of a “national feminine body” in Brazil. Existing between commodity and object of surveillance, patriarchal power, and an intimately related rigid gender binary, this is a body that has circulated domestically as a symbol of Brazilian cultural identity and historical specificity, and internationally as an exoticized symbol of Brazilian beauty – both corporeal and geographic. As I aim to explore, this “engineering” of the body through various modes of cultural production and dissemination intersects with notions of national modernity and exceptionalism from the early twentieth century to the present. This talk will thus approach different productions/representations of this supposedly national body throughout the last century by way of parallel discussions on Eugenics, the myth of racial democracy, soccer, plastic surgery, and bodybuilding, all of which have been expressions of national modernity and what that has meant in Brazil in the eras of industrial and late capitalism.