The tight-rope between vulgarity and chastity, how middle-class white women in the South of Brazil construct ‘modern’ sexual identities

Abstract

This article focuses on the lived experience of whiteness in self-identified white women from the middle classes in the Southern Brazilian city of Florianópolis and their attempts to reclaim and embody sexualities in which pleasure is as much the property of the feminine as the masculine. This forces them to tread a treacherous line between vulgarity and chastity as they strive for a ‘modern’ female sexual identity which not only explicitly challenges patriarchy but also creates the possibility of weakening regimes of white dominance. Highlighting the heterogeneous nature of whiteness in the South of Brazil allows a critique of academic assumptions about the nature of race and racism in Brazil and the construction of theoretical arguments about the radical potential for change to regimes of both gendered and racial dominance that spring from an anthropologically understood ‘mimicry’ of white Brazilian male heterosexuality.