Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the motives of European men (Gringos) who come to Brazil to consume colonial, pre-modern fantasies of patriarchy and carnivalesque sex, and looks at the performative strategies of the subaltern Brazilian women in search of global mobility who can identify, appropriate, perform, and market these fantasies of the sexualized Brazilian Mulata while also appropriating different forms of black-feminist cultural critique.

Paper long abstract:

By focusing on what I term the ‘transatlantic cultural economy of desire’, through the sexual interaction of gringos and mulatas in Brazil, I look at how the legacy of colonialism and the cultural and economic dynamics of late-capitalism mediate the desire for and the performance of “carnivalesque” sexualities between different global actors who are disempowered by different aspects of postmodernity and postcoloniality.

Here, the term “carnivalesque” is used neither as the classical Bakhtinian notion of “grotesque” nor strictly in the commodified eroticized sense of the Brazilian carnival, but hints at something in-between: an image and praxis of the body that remains pre-modern and collective (and hence untainted by the sexual restrictions that emerge with the modernist fragmentation into different bodies) and is also intensely exoticized by the discursive apparatuses of colonialism.

I examine on the one hand, the motives of disillusioned gringos who, arching under the weight of competitive capitalism in their own countries, come to seek power and prestige through sex and patriarchy in what they imagine to be a “masculinist paradise” (Gregory, 2003); from the other side of Atlantic, in turn, I explore the strategies of the women of colour who seek to escape their place at the bottom of the Brazilian racial pyramid by strategically emphasizing certain aspects of their ‘blackness’ and performing the fantasies of sexualized mulatas the gringos have come to consume.

In this global market of sex and performance, I pay particular attention not only to the strategic (and compulsive) appropriation of different cultural, racial and sexual colonial stereotypes by the gringos and mulatas seeking different forms of liberation, but also to their appropriation of different forms of cultural discourse and cultural critique.

Thus, I closely examine the gringos’ critique of post-feminist late-capitalism, and the “mulatas’” appropriation of Black-feminist discourse and body-praxis. By looking at these appropriations (both genuine and strategic), then, I begin to sketch the outline of contradictory but complimentary vernacular critiques of (post)modernity articulated by mostly subaltern global actors who are attempting to carve alternative niches through North-South cultural flows.