Maidens, flirts and seducers: the objectification of women’s bodies in the musical works of Chiquinha Gonzaga

Abstract

This paper discusses the objectification of women’s bodies in the discursive regularities present in the musical compositions of Chiquinha Gonzaga, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century composer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Guided by Foucauldian discourse analysis, the paper argues that enunciations emerging from Gonzaga’s songs are triggered by the devices of sexuality, racial whitening, resistance, confession and marriage. Based in a musical discourse that references women with terms such as maiden, seducer, flirt, tasty and mulatto, these enunciations are demarcated by hierarchies of gender, ethnicity and social class. Even though the enunciations under investigation are associated with a particular musical era in Rio de Janeiro’s history, they are not far removed from dominant enunciations about women in contemporary Brazil. This suggests the difficulty of breaking away from representations that subjugate women, particularly when the patriarchal power relations that enabled these representations remain prominent.