Pleasuring body parts: women and soap operas in Brazil

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Lisa Brown

I do not want to suggest that all women's experiences of sexuality and puberty are negative. What is clear, however, is that in Santa Cruz, given the codes of honour in relation to the status 'woman', it becomes impossible for a woman to talk about, to know about, and to get help and advice in relation to the vagina without appearing to declare herself as 'nothing anymore'. This constitutes an example of MacKinnon's more general contention that 'women are socially defined such that female sexuality cannot be lived or spoken or felt or even somatically sensed apart from its enforced definition, so that it is its own lack' (1989:119). However, Fournier rightly points out that this lack constitutes not an absence, as suggested in corporeal feminism, but rather that womanhood is constructed from the presence of pain. As she puts it: 'The work of gender inscription hurts' (2002: 68). This painful enrolment of the body in the work of gendering is evident in the women's experience of the ideas and practices around the virginity taboo.

Yet, as I show below, escape from the position of being thought of as 'mais nada' to a more respectable position involves a further negation of women's bodies.

Becoming 'acabada'

It is 5.30pm and the first of TV Globo's four evening soap operas has started, it is Malhacao (Work-out), about a group of middle-class Brazilian adolescents at a private school. Each month Malhacao, which is targeted at teenagers, addresses social issues such as racism, crime, poverty, HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy. I have come to watch it with Nilzete and her 16-year old daughter-in-law, Priscilla.

There are two rooms in the house where Nilzete lives with her partner, Crispim, their 11 children, as well as Priscilla and her baby. Nilzete comes hobbling in from the back room where she has been cooking. She says that at 36 she is already acabada (spent/finished) from so much childbirth and childrearing. We all sit on the bed. The only other piece of furniture is the colour TV. Nilzete says: 'We used to have a fridge, but it was sold to ...' A man enters. Nilzete looks at him disparagingly. She says to me: 'I don't know why l married such a dark black man. They scare me to death. Just watch any episode of Unedited Death--those murderers are all pretos (blacks).' (20) It is her husband, Crispim. He goes to sleep in the back room. Drunk. Nilzete says he has been unemployed for 12 years, which is why all the children are so rebellious. She sneers: 'All he is good for, is making babies.'

According to the Christian-informed taboos around female sexuality that are prevalent in Santa Cruz, motherhood constitutes an entrance into a more acceptable mode of recognition. As McCallum notes with regard to a similar slum in Salvador, although '[f]emale bodies draw in the gaze and excite the desire of procreative agency, inevitably women must constitute their respectable feminine identities through mothering at home, foregoing the excitement of the street' (1999: 286). I would add that motherhood is viewed as more acceptable because it diverts attention away from the vagina to a more respectable body part: the womb. It converts the potentially sexual body into a reproductive one. In fact, as Irigaray points out, the highest position a woman can achieve, according to Christianity, is as mother of God (in Whitford 1991: 142). Once Nilzete had children she was considered to be respectable, yet her actual life deteriorated.