Performing Race and Gender in Brazil: Karim Ainouz’s Madame Satã (2002)

This article focuses on the ways that racialized and gendered identities intersect in Brazil. It considers how the objectification of certain racialized and sexualized bodies became central to the national imaginary, and how Afro-descendant identitarian claims can simultaneously invoke and contest hegemonic representations of racial types. The second half of the article analyzes the performance of race and gender in the 2002 film Madame Satã, in the light of the ideologies discussed in the first half. It explores the construction of a black queer body as a spectacle mediated by racist cultures of national and popular discourse and cinematic images, and comments on how the protagonist of this biographical film plays with the assigned social meanings of black bodies in the interplay of race and gender relations.