Intimacy, inequality and democracia racial: theorizing race, gender and sex in the history of Brazilian race relations

Abstract

Although the history of race relations in Brazil is not necessarily a neglected area of study, social scientists have had to rely upon incomplete analysis of the historical processes that have contributed to the formation of the myth of racial democracy. This has resulted in a prevailing understanding of Brazilian race relations as enigmatic, ambiguous and contradictory. This article attempts to unravel the enigma of racial democracy by focusing on the key historical processes that produced the free coloured sector of the population: manumission and miscegenation. In addition, the theoretical framework developed for analysing the myth of racial democracy exposes how relations of power invested in the mechanisms of manumission and miscegenation were both racialized and sexualized, and that the paradigms for relations between blacks and white in Brazil are predicated on gendered notions of patronage embodied in these power relations.