Pleasuring body parts: women and soap operas in Brazil

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Lisa Brown

Abstract

In this article I look at women's interpretations of one of the most popular forms of entertainment across Latin America, namely telenovelas (soap operas). In particular, I look at how they are incorporated into the everyday lives of the poorest women in Brazil. I find that not only are they a central form of sociability for many women living in conditions of poverty; but also that women employ them as a means of challenging negative valuations around their bodies. In this context the female virginity taboo frames many women's views and experiences of sexuality. I argue that it conflates female sexuality with dominant notions of ownership and control of the vagina. This causes many women to experience their vaginas as shameful. It also leaves them vulnerable to harmful social sanctions. Yet, escape from this leads many women to experience their bodies in more painful and damaging ways. However, by investing in a cult of suffering that is prevalent both in their own lives and in the glamorous and wealthy world depicted in the soap operas, women find pleasure not only in suffering, but, crucially, in their negated body parts.

Keywords: body, Brazil, gender, sexuality, soap operas, virginity

Introduction

It is almost 9pm on 21 April 2000, and I am walking through Santa Cruz, a low-income neighbourhood in the coastal city of Salvador, Northeast Brazil. The streets are pulsating with life. People spill in and out of the lottery shop, the bars, the Church of God and Love. I turn off the main road and descend into a labyrinth of narrow alleyways. I am going to watch a Latin-American soap opera, or telenovela, with 40-year-old Helena, one of the founders of Santa Cruz. Like many of the first inhabitants who illegally occupied this land in 1978, she migrated to Salvador to escape drought and unemployment in the rural interior. The former slave-capital of Brazil, 70% of its population is Afro-Brazilian. Salvador now has a population of almost three million, and the highest unemployment rate in the country (Castro 2002). Between 1996 and 2000, 37% of Santa Cruz's residents were classified as 'inactive', (1) and the rate of unemployment in the area for the same period reached almost 26% (PED/RMS 2000). Like almost 63% of women in Santa Cruz (ibid), Helena is classified as inactive.

From the single street lamp a tangle of wires reaches de gato (by stealth -illegally) into the tightly packed dwellings and onto the televisions. Suddenly, Italian opera reverberates through the alleys. It heralds the start of the soap opera, Terra Nostra (Our land), currently the most popular soap opera in Brazil. (2) Since Helena lost her job as a domestic worker for a white family in one of the surrounding zonas nobres (noble zones), she watches all the telenovelas--about six a day, while caring for her eight children in a two-room shack.

Like the majority of rural immigrants who first came to Santa Cruz, Helena has no formal education. Instead, as she puts it: 'I learned everything I know from the church and the telenovelas.' As the most popular form of entertainment across Latin America, particularly amongst women, telenovelas have been widely credited with influencing people's behaviour. Even Northeast Brazil's rapidly declining birth rate has been attributed to the programmes (Faria & Potter 1994). (3) The claim is that women viewers are choosing to have fewer children in order to be able to afford the consumer lifestyle promoted in the programmes, and that more women are opting for Caesarian births in order to maintain a youthful body (read tight vagina). Though this may indeed be the case for some women, Helena and her neighbours do not have access to a range of health service options, and for them reproduction is not based on aesthetic considerations; in fact, it is not even perceived as a matter of choice, as Helena sums it up: 'God decided how many children I would have.'

The Northeast is the most devout Catholic region in Brazil, but affiliation to the Pentecostal churches, such as the Church of God and Love, is growing rapidly. (4) Although Helena is Catholic, she rarely attends church. She says she cannot afford smart clothes for the service or money for the collection, and that anyway her husband would get suspicious if she left the house for too long. Conversely, the only requirement for watching a telenovela is to own a television or at least have access to one, and over 90 per cent of households in Santa Cruz have at least one television. (5)

There is a small body of ethnographic research into telenovela viewing, which follows Moores's call to take seriously 'the interpretations of the media constructed by consumers in their everyday routines' (in Strelitz 2005:41) and which provides important insight into how telenovelas are incorporated into people's everyday lives (see, for example, Leal 1986; Kottak 1990; Jacks 1993; Sluyter-Beltrao 1993; Tufte 2000; Lopes 2002). Yet, due to a general lack of in-depth immersion into a particular context it tends to neglect the most marginalised viewers--women who, like Helena, remain largely invisible in the household and whose main form of sociability is the telenovela. (6) Based on ethnographic immersion in the poorest region in Brazil, I explore how such viewers draw on media texts as part of a response to the conditions of their lives. This falls within a tradition of qualitative social analysis that is, according to Strelitz, 'ultimately a form of storytelling in which certain "facts" are selectively related' (2005:141), (7) whilst at the same time locating these within wider economic and social formations (ibid).