THE BUTT SPATIALIZATION AND THE RESEXUALIZATION OF THE CITY

Abstract

This research aims to understand how the butt was codified in space as a symbol, allowing a huge network of products to create meaning from the female body and the city of Rio de Janeiro. Beginning in the 1970s, the mass culture expansion reshaped the image of Rio de Janeiro, spreading the female butt as a possible signifier of a Latin American culture associated with colonial fantasies, the advancement of neoliberalism, and pornography. Cultural devices spatialize and connect the butt to the city to inscribe sexual patterns in the promotion of local and global imaginaries, capturing the body of the "Brazilian woman" (incarnated in the Rio-born, white middle class' woman). The research is methodologically supported by Paul Preciado's concept of sex-politics, which seeks to understand dominant forms of biopolitical action in contemporary capitalism, in which sex and technologies for normalizing sexual identities act as agents of power. The purpose of this article is thus to trace the paths by which Brazilian sex politics established a culture of normalization over gender identities linked to city representations. Through the butt, values related to “Brazilianness” as an aesthetic standard and heteronormativity have been strengthened.