Sunday, January 14, 2007

The Lines of Demarcation, Beauty, and Liposuction: Or How the Daughter of German Immigrants Changed the Land of the Samba

I have been thinking about my relationship to food, and how sometimes I wish I could talk to someone about it. In our society only women have problems with food, but I guess I am part of the long list of male diabetics, horse jockeys, male body builders and corporate manorexics that live in silence and/or pleasure because of their relationship to wine and bread.

This article on Brazil, food, women, beauty and Brazil's beauty culture is very, very telling.

1 comment:

John K said...

Reading of the crossover of globalized white supremacist notions of anorexic beauty to women of African descent, I immediate thought of Clarice Lispector's stunning last novel, The Hour of the Star, and the suffering its Northeastern heroine undergoes as she tries and fails to fit in in the metropole, but also I thought of the work of another great Brazilian outsider, Marilene Felinto's The Women of Tijucopapo, whose discursive project in part wages a symbolic battle against the tyranny of such standards--of beauty, subjectivity, socialization, you name it. The text literally erupts again and again.... I wonder what Felinto, who lives and writes in São Paulo, has to say about all this?