“Femme” Fatale in Brazilian Cinema

Antônio Márcio da Silva is Coordinator of Portuguese Studies at the University of Kent, UK.

• Introduction 1. The Black Femme Fatale in Xica da Silva 2. The Femme Fatale's "Troubled" Gender in Madame Satã 3. Social Class and the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy in Bonitinha mas ordinária 4. The Fetish 'Dirt' as 'Social Pollution': The Married Femme Fatale in A dama do lotação 5. The 'Abject' Lesbian Fatale in As intimidades de Analu e Fernanda 6. 'Quoting' the Film-Noir Femme Fatale in A dama do Cine Shanghai Conclusion

'What is original about this study is da Silva's decision to theorize the concept of the femme fatale, a term that has been very much of a shifter, in the sense that it has been moved around the semantic grid to cover multiple concepts or has been used to cover a gap in that grid. The 'Femme' Fatale in Brazilian Cinema is attentive to the queer postulate that sociosexual categories are not fixed lexemes with a rigid hierarchy of sememes, but of gender in a society and its cultural production." - David William Foster, Regent's Professor of Spanish, Women and Gender Studies, Arizona State University, USA "This innovative book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the performativity of the so-called 'femme fatale' in a number of Brazilian films primarily from the 1970s and 1980s. Navigating between representations of the femme fatale, or the 'deadly woman', if one prefers, as black, homosexual, slave or as a teenager, da Silva provides a key assessment of the figure for Lusophone Studies and cultural and film studies more generally." - Richard Cleminson, Reader, History of Sexuality, University of Leeds, UK