Re-/Presenting Black Female Identity in Brazil: 'Filhas d' Oxum in Bahia Carnival

Abstract

Popular representations of black women in Brazilian Carnival are of hyper sexuality, nakedness and a certain exoticism linked to sex-tourism. These representations simultaneously make “Carnival in Brazil” synonymous with Rio’s carnival of tourism. Thus two distortions are reproduced, both of which encode race and gender in very specific ways. These stereotyped representations of women and of carnival, marketed internationally, run counter to the complexity of black women’s actual participation in Rio Carnival itself as well as that of the rest of Brazil and of Salvador-Bahia in particular where this study is located.