Representation and stereotypes of black women in Brazilian cinema

Abstract

This article presents a feminist critique of the Brazilian film industry through the analysis of the representation of black women in the highest-grossing movies over the last years. Our effort is divided in three parts: first, we review the literature on gender and race in Brazilian film, showing that the interplay between these categories has been seldom explored and the few works that do it suffer from methodological flaws; then we make a descriptive quantitative analysis on the profile of the top-grossing movies produced in Brazil; and, finally, we propose a typology of stereotypes associated with black and brown female protagonists. The results allow us to conclude that black women are still severely underpresented and predominantly represented by negative stereotypes that convey oversexualization, mischievousness, and domesticity.