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111 5 Bodies and Pleasures As complex and varied as they are, the structures that define both the traditional hierarchies of gender and the more modern interpretations of sexuality do not exhaust the field of sexual meanings in Brazilian culture. On the contrary, we can point to at least one more perspective that both draws upon these discourses and situates itself in opposition to them. We might describe this cultural frame as an ideology of the erotic, organized in terms of a very different logic, and offering its own distinct reading of the sexual universe. Although elaborated with constant reference to the structures of both gender and sexuality, this system of erotic meanings has focused neither on the construction of hierarchies nor on the rationalized interrogation of inner truths. Instead, it examines the diverse possibilities for sexual pleasure that these other ways of conceptualizing sexual life have largely ignored or circumscribed. It has thus offered an alternative model of the sexual universe for Brazilians to draw upon in shaping and interpreting their sexual experience.1 Like the systems of gender and sexuality, or for that matter, the origin myths that have been built up around the symbolism of sexual life, the full development of this erotic frame of reference can also be situated historically . It can be linked to the same processes that have been responsible for the increasing rationalization of sexual meanings in Brazilian life: to the massive social dislocations that have taken place in Brazil since at least the early twentieth century as a result of the pace of industrialization, urbanization , and modernization. Its most elaborate articulation as a distinct cultural perspective can therefore be found in those sectors of Brazilian society where these interrelated processes have been carried furthest—where the changing nature of Brazilian life has increasingly undercut the legitimacy of social structures such as the family, the Church, and even the state. Indeed, 112 Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions as the institutions that have traditionally functioned as the chief regulators of sexual life have been called into question, new territory has been opened up for sexual exploration and experimentation. However, it would be a mistake to interpret this ideology of the erotic as nothing more than an unintended consequence of modernity itself. Its relation to the central traditions of Brazilian culture is far more complicated and intimate. Although it seems to intersect at a number of points with the self-conscious modernization of sexual life described above, it can also be linked in a variety of ways to the wider world of sexual meanings in Brazil . It can be found, for example, as a subversive undercurrent in the structure of the plantation economy and the patriarchal order. Indeed, throughout Brazilian history, while it has tended to escape or even overturn the boundaries of both gender and sexuality in its alternative reading of sexual life, this erotic frame of reference has nonetheless been unavoidably tied to these other systems. Through its relationship to these other systems, it has functioned to structure the nature of erotic experience, and only by examining it in relation to them will it be possible to interpret its own distinct logic and to understand the ways in which this logic transforms the meaning of sexual practice in Brazil. This, in turn, will enable us to explore the range of meanings associated with erotic life, and to examine erotic experience, not by reducing it to some other level of reality or additional set of explanatory principles, but by interpreting it as itself a cultural construct: a product of intersubjective symbolic forms, ideological structures, semantic configurations , and the like, which take on significance within the flow of social life. Transgression Whether implicitly or explicitly, the systems of gender and sexuality quite clearly articulate a repertoire of sexual practices, some defined as acceptable and others as prohibited. Yet they fail to limit this repertoire fully because the very notion of prohibition implies the possibility of transgression. Like a definition of the acceptable, a definition of the prohibited—and by extension, of the forms of transgression—has been central to the symbolic economies of both gender and sexuality in Brazil. It is through the negative images of sexual transgression, whether in concrete figures such as the cuckold or the whore or in abstract concepts such as sin, sickness, or abnormality, that the systems of gender and sexuality have been able to regulate and reproduce themselves. Yet because this is the case, because their internal order depends upon...

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