Introduction

Abstract

The femme fatale (often translated into English as “deadly woman”) is a well-known figure in the arts, popular culture, and the media in general, especially in cinema where the character has become prominent—for example, in noir and neo-noir films of the twentieth century. Despite the term commonly being used to refer to sexually “dangerous” women, defining it on a deeper level is a complex and challenging task. For instance, Hanson and O’Rawe observe that the femme fatale is both an “entrenched cultural stereotype and yet never quite fully known: she is always beyond definition” (Cherchez 1) because she evokes more than she describes. However, this research argues that the femme fatale is beyond a single definition because she has multiple gender and sexual identities, and belongs to different social classes and racial groups, which does not mean that she cannot be defined at all. Moreover, Doane’s claim that the femme fatale “never really is what she seems to be” (1) may be better rephrased as “she is not only what popular culture imagines her to be”: a deadly beautiful heterosexual Caucasian woman, as evident in various portrayals of the figure in cinema. Indeed, because such a conception and construction of the femme fatale are disseminated and deeply ingrained in social imaginaries about her, other femmes fatales who do not fall into such a category are ignored, as this book aims to show in relation to Brazilian cinema.