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Abstract
This article discusses the accounts of a group of upper-middle-class white men of Rio de Janeiro about their sexual access to domestic workers (empregada) during their adolescence. After a brief discussion of the specific characteristics of whiteness in Brazil, the interviewees’ sexual experiences are discussed in relation to Freyre’s description, in Casa-Grande e Senzala, of the sexual relationship of the white slave master’s son with the mulata slave. This sexual relationship was recognized by the interviewees as a symbolically dense site for understanding their own experiences with empregadas even if the empregada’s skin color is considered less relevant than her class. I argue that these sexual relationships contribute to shaping the interviewees’ experiences of whiteness. In particular, interviewees’ silence about empregadas’ skin color is also a silence about their own skin color and part of the larger silence surrounding whiteness understood as a site of class and color privilege.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of LACES for their thoughtful suggestions and comments, and to Gail Pheterson and Paola Tabet for their careful reading of an earlier version of this article. My thanks to the editorial board as well.
Notes
[1] According to recent research, the A class comprises 82.3 per cent whites and 17.7 per cent blacks; see http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/noticias/2011/11/111116_saude_negros_brasil_mm.shtml (accessed 11 August 2012).
[2] Some data from this investigation were published in Ribeiro Corossacz (Citation2010a, Citation2010b, Citation2012, Citation2014a, Citation2014b).
[3] For an analysis of mestiçagem as a nationalist ideology and a lived process in other Latin American societies, see Wade (Citation2001, Citation2005).
[4] I analyzed how this sexual relationship was incorporated into the narrative of the formation of the Brazilian nation through its naturalization, that is to say, the negation of its social meaning, in Ribeiro Corossacz (Citation2005).
[5] Dwellers of favelas, low-income settlements.
[6] This relationship between the invisibilization of whiteness and mestiçagem is not found only in Brazil; for an overview of Latin America, see Telles and Flores (Citation2013).
[7] At the same time, it is worth noting that some light-skinned Brazilians may classify themselves as morenos and valorize sun tanning to look less ‘white’ (see Norvell Citation2002).
[8] Essentially used for official statistics, the category pardo means brown.
[9] In relation to this, Loveman makes an important distinction between whiteness in Latin America at an individual level vs. collective level: while at the individual level whiteness was considered self-evident and stable, at the collective level it was constructed as a variable and malleable trait (Citation2009, 226).
[10] See Moreno Figueroa for a discussion of the Mexican context, in which the ideology of mestizaje also made it possible to reproduce the valorization of whiteness (Citation2010).
[11] These statistics date from 2010 and are drawn from the Rio de Janeiro government website www.armazemdedados.rio.rj.gov.br (accessed 10 July 2012).
[12] Sheriff also notes that the middle-class white people she interviewed do not usually encounter black people ‘outside of the servant-employer relationship’ (Citation2000, 119).
[13] The term mulato has racist origins and indicates a person born of one white and one black parent. The term is not used in institutional color classifications and, in my fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, I rarely encountered it in daily language. The term mulata, however, is much more common, especially when used to reference its sexual and sensual connotations and as a national symbol associated with Carnaval and the mestiçagem process of national formation.
[14] For further reflections on the implications of the ethnography of whiteness, see Back (Citation2002).
[15] Freyre (Citation1900–1987), a social anthropologist who trained with Boas, is one of the most important figures in the formation of Brazilian national identity. His work offered a positive and optimistic interpretation of Brazilian society that valorized the paradigm of mestiçagem, which at the time was considered one of the causes of Brazil’s backwardness (for a critical analysis, see Ortiz Citation2003; Skidmore Citation1974; for an intellectual biography of Freyre, see Needell Citation1995; Pallares-Burke Citation2005).
[16] An expression Guillaumin (Citation2002) uses to indicate how, within racist ideology, minority groups are valorized only in specific and delimited spheres of human action, making it possible for the majority group to express itself freely and successfully in all spheres.
[17] I recall Jorge Amado, among many others. See for some reflections on the mulata woman as a ‘mythical or imaginary figure’, Corrêa (Citation1996).
[18] The master’s house and the residence of the slaves in the fazendas of the large plantations.
[19] Literally ‘employed’, implicitly domestic. Such a minimalist definition highlights the key features of this person’s condition, that is, the state of being employed by others to carry out domestic and caretaking work, thus erasing her professional profile.
[20] For an analysis of the enormous extent to which unpaid domestic work overall falls on women without significant variation in relation to color, see Bruschini (Citation2006).
[21] On the symbolic ties between black female gender and domestic work, see also McCallum (Citation2007). For some data on black women’s incorporation in the labor market, see Lima (Citation1995), Silva Bento (Citation1995), Bruschini and Lombardi (Citation2002), and Lovell (Citation2006).
[22] In the 1980s, it was still common for women living at their employer’s houses to keep a son or daughter with them.
[23] This kind of relationship was considered so ‘normal’ that it also provided the subject matter for a field of cinematographic production located between pornography and comedy, called pornochancada, that through comical representation normalized a subject presented as an innocuous game of ‘seduction’. One of the most well-known of these is Como é boa nossa empregada (‘How hot is our domestic worker’, 1972), in which the use of the pronoun ‘our’ serves to indicate the film’s implicit subject (a middle-class white man). I thank Afrânio Garcia Jr. for having drawn my attention to this field of film production as a locus for reproducing and legitimating the color, class, and gender hierarchies it represents.
[24] Although not in reference to nordestinos, Pinho notes the importance of regional differences in defining whiteness and blackness, and speaks appropriately of ‘degrees of whiteness’ (Citation2009, 40).
[25] In the United States, the concept of white trash and the initial exclusion of some immigrant groups from the category of white display characteristics similar to those experienced by nordestinos in Brazil, see Warren and Twine (Citation1997) and Wray (Citation2006).
[26] The empregada and the prostitute have different social roles: the former is paid to carry out domestic activities, which also would seem to include being sexually available, while the latter is paid for a specified sexual performance. There is an explicit agreement underlying a sexual relationship with a prostitute, whereas interviewees express that their relationships with the empregadas were imposed, a kind of domination. However, the interviews revealed continuity in men’s experiences of interacting with the two figures revolving around men’s processes of learning and taking on a heterosexual, racialized and class-inflected sexuality (see Ribeiro Corossacz Citation2014b).
[27] One of the episodes in the film Como é boa nossa empregada is titled ‘O terror das empregadas’.
[28] It was not always possible from the interviews to establish how much unpaid domestic work was carried out by the interviewee’s mother.
Additional information
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Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz
Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz is at Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali, Largo Santa Eufemia 19, 41121 Modena, Italy (Email: [email protected]).