Body Parts on Planet Slum: Women and Telenovelas in Brazil (Key Issues in Modern Sociology) - Hardcover

‘Drawing on class, race and gender analysis, Lisa Beljuli Brown provides a fascinating window into television novelas, a staple of Brazilian popular culture. More than just television, the dramas provide poor black women with an essential escape from the endless, backbreaking work as mothers, wives, and servants, transforming a fictional pleasure into a survival strategy.’ —Teresa Meade, Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture, Union College

‘Pairings of sociology and psychoanalysis tend to go the way of reductionism: the empirical field is narrowed to fit the prescriptions of psychoanalytic theory, or else the theory is utilized with little fluency. Neither is the case in Lisa Beljuli Brown’s brilliant analysis, in which lived experience and conceptual sophistication sit alongside an informed and sensitive politics to illuminate the topics of telenovelas and poor women’s lives in the bairro.’ —Dr Derek Hook, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London

‘‘Body Parts on Planet Slum’ offers provocative, unexpected insights that link Brazil’s glitzy novelas, or daily soap operas, to the harsh social realities of urban life in Bahia. Reflecting on their suffering, survival strategies and Christian values, it reveals how women at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum find their lives unpredictably mirrored, and happy endings realized, in glamorous television dramas. It is a must-read.’ —Marguerite Itamar Harrison, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Smith College