Vivendo do Rebolado: Feminilidades, corpos e erotismos no show business televisivo

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, a group of erotic dancers known as the Chacretes gained notoriety in Brazilian television. As well as being stagehands for the host Chacrinha during his talk show, they were also players in a growing erotic market. This article takes a step back from the pinnacle of their stardom to analyse how these dancers came to occupy this market niche. It aims to analyse the selection process these dancers were submitted to, focusing mainly on the requirements for becoming show business women on TV. Its main argument is that genders, bodies and eroticisms become enmeshed in the construction of the television image of these women, and that they are made explicit in the processes that regulate the recruitment and exposition of their images. The emphasis on the bodily aesthetic of the Chacretes trigger a varied constellation of social markers of difference (such as gender, age, colour/ race, sexuality, class, etc.), all which intersect as a function of criteria of distinction, making some bodies more desirable than others, as some became the objects of recruitment and attention while others do not.