Gênero e erotismo: etnografia de um clube de mulheres no Rio de Janeiro.

Abstract

This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study about gender performances in a Women s Club in Rio de Janeiro. After a male strip-tease show exclusively for a women s audience, starts a dancing party and the presence of men is allowed in the club. During the show, heterosexual activities between the women from the audience and the strippers are simulated on the stage. Most of the songs played during the show in the so called pornofunk style - bring several references to sexuality and gender roles, such as male and female marital infidelity, sexual orgy and male and female prostitution. As a kind of ritual of inversion, during the show, there are both a suspension and a reiteration of traditional gender rules and conventions. As objects for the erotic fruition of the women in the audience, the male strippers sustain nonetheless an active role through the simulated sexual practices, and both their body presentation and their performance demonstrate sexual promptness, virility and control over female behavior. Despite the fact that they are paying for the show, and in this way occupying a position traditionally reserved to men in Brazilian society, the women brought to the stage show a partial submission to male control. After the show, when the male audience is allowed inside the club, anonymous heterosexual couples interact by successive approaches that include kissing, petting, or cuddling. Women then show a more conventional gender performance, even though they are more sexually open and receptive. Sexual and gender conventions are largely maintained by the idea that women depend on special stimulus to do or desire to do things that men are supposed to be always ready to in the field of eroticism and sexuality. These conventions are also reinforced by the social stigma that is attached both to the male strippers always suspect of being gays or prostitutes - and to the female audience, seen by many as sexually and morally dishonest.