Corporalidade brasileira na fabricação da identidade nacional

This paper discusses how, through the creation of Embratur (Brazilian Tourism Company) in 1966, an idealized Brazilian female body was constructed and used to help manufacture a national identity, reinforcing the stereotype of the sexualized Brazilian woman. As it was often associated with sex tourism, this stereotype received much criticism and led to a negative image of Brazil abroad. However, in the 1990s the official tourism lobby softened the “sexy tone” of its discourse, and in 1999 Embratur received an award from the World Tourism Organization for its campaign to help fight the exploitation of children and youth by sexual tourism. In order to better understand how this change in the idealized Brazilian female body unfolded, it is important to deconstruct beauty standards – focusing on those that apply to Brazilian women as seen from abroad – and their relationship to modern consumer culture. Assuming that the cultural analysis of the female body emerges as an important issue in the field of Social Science, the focus on body image can be viewed as a key element in discussions about the construction of national identity.

Desejos, brasilidades e segredos: o negócio do sexo na relação entre clientela espanhola e travestis brasileiras

The gender ethinicization and the nationality sexualization are aspects that have been discussed in the relationship between Spanish clients and Brazilian transvestites in the brisk sex business in Spain. Sometimes, in these sexual relationships, which are also business relationships, erotic aspects are associated with exoticism that is not related only to nationality or race, but also to new sexual experiences that are more exciting than those considered conventional practices. Hence, the connection between Brazil and the transgender body, made by some Spanish clients, makes sense only when considering the dense sexual grammar involved in those relationships. These signs were structured based on continual colonial attributions, which have been given fresh meaning by the new migration flow resulting from the broad spread of images and insertion of Brazil into the sexual tourism route. Aiming at fully discussing this proposal, this research is based on the queer theory and on other studies in the literature that focus on the poststructuralist and post-colonial sex market. These tools were used to analyze the data gathered in an ethnographic study carried out in São Paulo, Madrid, and Barcelona, as well as data collected from Spanish websites about sexual interest in transvestites