Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture

Introduction

Gonzalez presented “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira” at the annual meeting of the Brazilian social science association ANPOCS in Rio de Janeiro on 31 October 1980; it was printed in 1984 in “Ciências Sociais Hoje”. The text states its method at the outset: its epistemological support comes from Freud and Lacan, that is, from psychoanalysis. Racism, Gonzalez argues, is the symptom that characterises a Brazilian cultural neurosis, and its connection with sexism has particularly violent effects on Black women. She distinguishes consciousness, the place of misrecognition, concealment and forgetting in which ideology speaks, from memory, a “not-knowing that knows”, in which a history that was never written is inscribed. She then reads three figures through which Brazilian culture speaks of Black women: the mulata of carnival, the domestic worker and the “black mother” (mãe preta), the nanny who, she argued, passed on to the children of the masters the Portuguese shaped by African languages that she called “pretuguês”, and so Africanised Brazilian culture. Written partly in the language of everyday speech, the text is now read as a founding text of Black feminism in Brazil.

More works by Lélia Gonzalez

• 1988The Political-Cultural Category of Amefricanity