Labeling Brazil: A Nation’s Image on Beauty Products, Services, and Procedures

Abstract

Labeling Brazil: A Nation’s Image on Beauty Products, Services, and Procedures Patricia De Santana Pinho (bio) Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. —bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation Brazil Butt Lift will lift, shape, and reduce your problem areas using Brazilian spice to make your booty look nice! —“New Beachbody Product Brazil Butt Lift,” Team Beachbody BrazilLift video the geopolitics of aesthetics “Hey, Pat! I wanna have a Brazilian butt!” exclaimed my neighbor-turned-friend Alicia as she hurried across the street to greet me. Perplexed, but also amused by her comment, I could only bring myself to reply, jokingly, “I do too!” Coming from a Brazilian woman, my response was meant to underscore the highly idealized nature of what a “Brazilian butt” and, more broadly, a Brazilian body have come to symbolize in the United States. I knew what Alicia was referring to. When this exchange happened in 2014, I had already seen plenty of allusions to the Brazilian butt in the United States. I had watched hip hop music videos displaying Brazilian women’s bodies, including Snoop Dogg’s 2002 video [End Page 423] “Beautiful,” parading bikini-clad women of many shades but not many forms.1 I had seen Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infamous video of his trip to Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, where, behaving like a mesmerized gringo, he groped the buttock of a mulata dancer during a samba performance.2 And I had also watched the latest, and perhaps greatest, manifestation of the fiction of the Brazilian female body in the hysterical infomercial for the Brazil Butt Lift. The 28-minute-long video that advertises the Brazil Butt Lift shows a group of predominantly white and all thin women wearing short shorts and crop tops, dancing on a sunny beach, and following the lead of a light-skinned, muscular, male instructor (Figure 1). A large Brazilian flag, attached to a palm tree serving as its pole, waves in the background as a female voice describes the product and its inventor: “Created by Leandro Carvalho, trainer to world famous super models, Brazil Butt Lift will lift, shape, and reduce your problem areas using Brazilian spice to make your booty look nice!”3 Carvalho then describes the “spices” that he blends to create the formula that allows US American women to obtain a Brazilian butt, and he does so while offering a lesson on Brazilian culture: “Being born in Brazil and raised in Brazil, the culture is all about the butt! Everyone is crazy about the butt down there, so you have to work the butt like crazy. So I got ballet, I got capoeira, I put some Afro-Brazilian dance — because that really works the butt— so I put it all together to make a fun workout.”4 The Brazil Butt Lift is one of several patented exercise routines of the US American fitness multinational corporation Team Beachbody. But it is no longer the only way to achieve a Brazilian butt through exercising. Other versions of the Brazil butt lift are becoming increasingly available, and not just in the United States. A recent report in a major Brazilian newspaper discusses a new workout developed in Portugal that also promises to deliver the much-desired Brazilian butt. Titled [End Page 424] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Image from the Brazil Butt Lift infomercial and product training guide. Team Beachbody, “Brazil Butt Lift Product Training Guide,” 2010, 1, https://images.beachbody.com/coach-office/downloads/BrazilButt_PTG_041610.pdf. “The Bumbum of the Brazilian Woman Becomes a Hit Class in Portugal’s Gyms,” the article describes the craze around the “3b” or the “Bum Bum Brasil” technique, developed and patented by yet another Brazilian male trainer, Claudio Silva. The article explains that 99 percent of the class participants are women and that they are all attempting to obtain the “bunda brasileira,” which is seen abroad as “a model” because Brazilian women have “big and beautiful butts.”5 [End Page 425] Revealingly, this Portuguese representation of the Brazilian butt as round and big is at odds with the one advertised in...