CHAPTER 2 The Aesthetics of Domination

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CHAPTER 2 The Aesthetics of Domination by Mind Map: CHAPTER 2  The Aesthetics of Domination

1. CHAPTER 3 Color-Blind Erotic Democracies, Black Consciousness Politics, and the Black Cinderellas of Felicidade Eterna

2. RACE AND CLASS IN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED STATES

3. In Brazil, it is race and racism that people are generally uncomfortable speaking about

4. Although there is no legally sanctioned racism in Brazil, the structures of racism are present in everyday experiences

5. Color terms in Brazil are complicated and elided with words used to refer to “racial identities

6. Fry argues that race and color casting in Brazil is highly situational and that racial bipolarization is more a desire of the politically correct North Americans and elite Brazilian classes and less a reality among the poorer segments of Brazilian society

7. Many of the women I came to know through Glória believed that one of their best opportunities for “getting ahead” 16 was their ability to seduce older, richer, whiter men, whom they referred to as coroas.

8. This version of the coroa parable is similar to a black Cinderella story: both include seducing an economically more stable man, and both female protagonists experience social mobility as a result

9. In the coroa story, the women themselves have inverted the historical master-slave relationship and have opted—at least in fantasy, and sometimes in reality—to pursue the coroa.

10. One of these immigrants, Jerônimo, ends up falling in love with Rita Bahiana, a beautiful mulatta woman.

11. In contrast, Brazilian images of black women, and particularly representations of the sexually “hot” mulata, have largely remained unexamined, particularly in the public space of Brazilian popular culture.

12. A similar situation exists concerning the literature on race. For a long time, writing about the politics of race was tabo

13. Isadora wanted her two youngest daughters from her second marriage, Katryny and Priscila, who are white, to go to the Xuxa modeling school in Botafogo

14. For the women in Felicidade Eterna, the seduction of a lighter-skinned man may actually also serve to empower them in a culturally meaningful way, since the seduction requires a selfrepresentation that emphasizes the heightened erotic powers of black sensuality

15. The idea that Brazil is a color-blind erotic democracy—that the power associated with gender, race, and class plays no role in sexual partnerships —helps to mask and normalize everyday racism and internalized racism in Brazil.

16. In 1992, Glória was earning about six dollars a day

17. May 1995 Gloria and her daughter Soneca in kitchen.

17.1. Glória had already become an important confidante of Dona Beth

17.2. Glória’s daughters found it extremely difficult to secure decent working-class jobs with adequate pay because of their observable racial and class characteristics, a combination that worked against them.

17.2.1. Glória’s daughters suffered doubly in an economy that rewards Afro-Brazilian women the lowest pay.

17.3. Dona Beth offered to pay Glória approximately five minimum wages per month for a six-day workweek if Glória would agree to work as her exclusive empregada (domestic worker).

17.4. Glória’s life in the early 1990s as having been a slave to feeding both her own and her adopted children

17.5. 1990s, Glória would travel each day of the week to a different employer’s home

17.6. Payment was made on a daily basis by each employer.

17.7. Glória earned substantially more in her position as a faxineira

17.8. If she had not found Beth, Glória would have continued earning one to two minimum wages per month

17.9. This cultivated incompetence is an important sign of class.

17.10. the relationship between domestic workers like Glória and their employers is anything but straightforward.

17.11. POVERTY IN BRAZIL AND RIO DE JANEIRO

17.12. In 1985, São Paulo accounted for 26 percent of the country’s manufacturing production, while Rio accounted for only 7 percent

17.13. Migration to the city has been a significant factor in Rio’s growth

17.14. CLASS, CULTURE, AND THE EFFECTS OF DOMINATION

17.15. FROM SLAVERY TO SERVITUDE

17.16. Glória recalls spending part of her childhood in the interior state of Minas Gerais, in a town called Bom Jesus de Moreira,

17.17. The history of Rio de Janeiro has been intimately connected to the lives of slaves, ex-slaves, and domestic workers since the beginning of the colonial period,

17.18. The visit of King Albert and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium to Rio de Janeiro in September 1920 represents a telling historical moment when Brazilians (here, of the elite classes)

17.19. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SPACES

17.20. THE COROA AND THE IDEOLOGY OF WHITENING

17.21. For the women in Felicidade Eterna, the seduction of a lighter-skinned man may actually also serve to empower them in a culturally meaningful way, since the seduction requires a selfrepresentation that emphasizes the heightened erotic powers of black sensuality.

17.22. The story of the coroa is interesting to consider in the context of age, class, sexuality, and gender

17.23. Glória is greatly respected and regarded as a tough woman in Felicidade Eterna

17.24. Mirelli’s father “lost” her mother in a card game called ronda or baralho; this humiliating defeat meant that her mother had to sleep with the man he lost to.

17.25. When Mirelli was six years old, her mother died, and Mirelli’s destiny was decided by the circumstances of her extended family

17.26. Mirelli feels that she never really experienced a childhood

17.27. During the years I spent among Glória and her network of friends and family, I became an avid fan of the Brazilian telenovela.

17.28. “laughter out of place” does not go unnoticed by the middle and upper classes, though it is often summarily dismissed

18. In Brazil, those cultural elements that remained purely African or too closely associated with slavery were denigrated. In spite of the absorption of some elements, which sometimes legitimated and elevated previously denigrated African traditions, blackness

19. Since the 1950s, most Brazilianists have agreed on the following interpretation of the construction of race in the two countries

20. In 1993, Veja, Brazil’s popular weekly newsmagazine, reported the case of Ana Flávia Peçanha Azeredo, a black woman who was physically assaulted for delaying an elevator in a middle-class apartment building

21. Living in a favela is automatically a class marker in Rio de Janeiro.

22. In 1991, Glória told me that her friend Janaína, who lived in a favela near Felicidade Eterna, was on her way out of the favela, that she had found herself a coroa, a man in whose house she had been employed for a number of years as a domestic worker

23. As a method of escaping from poverty, however, marrying or seducing a coroa is based on gendered and racialized values of attractiveness in an erotic market.

24. REPRESENTATIONS AND COMMODIFICATIONS OF BLACK BODIES The late-nineteenth-century novel O Cortiço (published in English in 2000 as The Slum), written in 1890, just after abolition, by Aluísio Azevedo, connects eroticism, race relations, and social mobility in Brazil

25. Here Azevedo’s novel provides a foundational vision of the mulata seductress and her symbolic linkage with everything tropical, sensual, untamed, and Brazilian. She is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous.

26. The Jezebel is an aggressive and dangerous (amoral) whore, an image both racially and sexually charged that reduces black women to an essential, primal sexuality

27. HIERARCHIES OF BEAUTY AND SOCIAL MOBILITY In Felicidade Eterna, being a mixed-race or black female is not sufficient for being considered a hot, sexual mulata.

28. THE COROA AND THE IDEOLOGY OF WHITENING In an astute psychological account of internalized racism in Brazil titled Tornar-se Negro ou as Vicissitudes da Identidade do Negro Brasileiro em Ascensão Social

29. The fantasy of seducing a coroa held by low-income mixed-race women provides evidence of a pattern of erotic calculation that is neither democratic, nor egalitarian, nor idiosyncratic; it is instead tied to the economic correlations of blackness in Brazil.

30. It is time to bring a deeper understanding to the nature of eroticized racism, rather than simply declare that “Brazil is different