Body Parts on Planet Slum: Women and Telenovelas in Brazil

183 Pages·2011·1.305 MB·English

by  Lisa Beljuli Brown

Body Parts on Planet Slum

Body Parts on Planet Slum
Women and Telenovelas in Brazil
Lisa Beljuli Brown
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2011
by ANTHEM PRESS
75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Lisa Beljuli Brown 2011
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover image ‘Nilzete watching the telenovela, A Indomada, Santa Cruz, January 2000’
© 2011 Lisa Beljuli Brown
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Lisa Beljuli.
Body parts on planet slum : women and telenovelas in Brazil / Lisa Beljuli Brown.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-85728-797-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-85728-797-4
1. Poor women–Brazil–Social conditions. 2. Slums–Brazil. 3. Television soap
operas–Brazil. I. Title.
HQ1542.B76 2011
306.4–dc23
2011033939
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 797 7 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 797 4 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an eBook.
For Mary Hurley

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Introduction xvii
Chapter 1 Theodicy and Ideology: ‘Everybody Needs
an Ideology to Live’ 1
Chapter 2 The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth; But in the
Meantime They Shall Watch Telenovelas 21
Chapter 3 Suffering Soaps; Fragmented Bodies 59
Chapter 4 The Politics of the Vagina 67
Chapter 5 The Redemptive Womb 81
Chapter 6 The Invisible Back 99
Final Feliz 121
Illustrations 125
Table: Women Respondents 133
Glossary 137
Bibliography 139
Index 149

FOREWORD
Janie grows up with her ex-slave grandmother in the yard-room of a kindly,
wealthy white family in rural western Florida. She plays all the time with the
four white children. One day a roving photographer takes a picture of the five
children:
“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t
nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s
where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So
Ah ask, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me’.
“Everybody laughed… ‘Dat’s you…don’t you know yo’ownself?’… Ah looked
at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said:
“‘Aw aw! Ah’m coloured!’
“Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Am seen de picture Ah thought
Ah wuz just like de rest. (Zora Neale Hurston 1937)
Rereading Body Parts on Planet Slum brought to mind this icon of Janie in
Hurston’s novel of more than fifty years earlier.1 The impoverished women of
the bairros of Salvador with whom Beljuli Brown lived and worked are also the
descendants of African slaves. I want to ask: how similarly and how differently
from Janie do these women find themselves, mirrored in the white, middle-
class heroines of the soap operas that play day in, day out on broken-down
televisions in overcrowded shacks? As the book’s title indicates, slums are our
future. Indeed, our future is already behind us; the ‘slumification’ of the planet
is outstripping all predictions. What this book portrays and the theses it argues
are thus urgent, general rather than particular.
Lisa Beljuli Brown refers to the so-called ‘mirror-stage’ in the theory of the
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; here I want to reopen the discussion through
1 I would like to thank my daughter, Polly Rossdale, for explaining to me the main
similarities and differences between Brazilian and North American slavery and for
finding this half-remembered quotation from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).