Framing the Video Vixen

This chapter explores the transnational circulation of notions of black hypersexuality in Brazil and beyond. It focuses on three sites of analysis that explore how cross-cultural perceptions of sexual difference are produced and perpetuated in the tourism industry. First, it examines Oswaldo Sargentelli’s Oba-Oba mulata shows, which situated the mulata on stage as an eroticized spectacle for the consumption of white male foreigners. Second, it analyzes a YouTube video that depicts a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage dancing with a woman of African descent who is dancing samba. Seeing her scantily clad, he takes the opportunity to grab her behind. Finally, the presentation reflects on the Marcha das Vadias (Slut Walk) that occurred in Salvador for the three years (2011-2013). In these three sites of analysis, women of African descent, like “sluts” and sex workers, are seen as having no bodily rights worth protecting. This presentation draws upon often overlooked scholarship on black Brazilian feminisms to address how black Brazilian women “recuperate and re-imagine their own sexualities” within a transnational tourism industry that depends upon their bodies and their emotional and sexual labor.