From the shore to the dining room: Gender and domesticity in bossa nova and tropicalia

Abstract

The article intends to understand two important musical movements within the Brazilian culture, bossa nova and tropicalismo, through a dimension seldom explored, that is, the way the artists' homes, spaces for subjectivity as well as for living domesticity, helped to shape the sociability, the musical practices and the gender relations within the artistic production in the two biggest Brazilian metropolis. As far as bossa nova is linked to the urban experience in Rio de Janeiro, tropicalismo is rooted, for a while, to the cultural and urban dynamics of São Paulo. The article is founded on interconnected grounds: first, in the idea that houses depend on the making of and on the internalization of hierarchical principles, of classifying patterns and of subjective dispositions; second, houses as artifacts which express worldviews and manners of behaving in space. These intertwined fundamentals open up promising ways of tackling the relations between the city and the cultural production, rooted in social marks of class, gender, race and generation.