Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New York

1. Middle-Class Trajectories

31 Chapter 1 Middle-Class Trajectories Would like to address myself, in a straight line, directly, without courier, only to you, but I do not arrive, and that is the worst of it. A tragedy, my love, of destination. Everything becomes a postcard once more, legible for the other, even if he understands nothing about it. —Derrida, The Postcard1 As I now travel to Brazil feeling as if I should send a message back to a home that evades a precise geographic location, I stroll through tourist centers looking at postcards that I fantasize about sending—and never do. Images of beaches are juxtaposed with Rio de Janeiro’s statue of Christ and semi-naked women’s bodies in carnival parades. A number of postcards picture people of darker skin colors, some of them wearing typical regional costumes. What the postcards fail to depict are the polluted waters of the ocean, the shantytowns, and the urban violence so widespread in Brazil. Also absent from the stereotypical views, both those of national celebration and the depictions of poverty as folklore , are images of middle-class people and the landscapes they inhabit. They are just not exotic enough, not authentic enough for the tourist gaze. What is there to attract the viewer in images of shopping malls, traffic jams, airports, and antiseptic office buildings that can be found anywhere? Brazilian middle-class women hold a paradoxical position in relation to the Brazilian nation, caught between antithetical views of what it means to be Brazilian and what it means to be part of a global proj- 32 Transnational Desires ect of modernity. As Bourdieu (1984) argues in his study of the French class system, one’s position in the social class system is the result of a complex combination of subjective and objective factors. These include variables such as income and ownership of land, houses, and durable goods, as well as one’s family history, taste, aesthetic preferences, and relationship to other classes. In the case of the middle class in “peripheral ” countries of the Global South (Johnson 1985),2 other factors must also be considered: the colonial and post- and neocolonial relation to centers of political and economic power, racial configurations, ways of dealing with drastic changes in the politics and economics of a country, and the perceived or real experience of violence and urban chaos (Caldeira 2000). As members of the middle class from the Global South (De Kooning 2005; Fernandes 2000; Guano 2002), the women in my research inhabit a space between the local reality and the global promises of modernity . This makes problematic their identity in regard to a fixed geography , as supplied by a specific relationship to a nation-state. Appadurai (1990) and Gupta (1992) argue that national identity is just one form of organizing space and that attention should be given to other forms of conceptualizing what Benedict Anderson has called “imagined communities .” In Gupta’s (1992) assessment of Anderson’s work, he points out that the elite and middle class of the Third World do not necessarily identify horizontally with the other constituencies that are part of the same nation-state—that is, the working class, which in Brazil correspond to racialized others of darker skin color. Rather, the peripheral elite and middle class are more likely to identify with the elite and middle class of the First World centers of power. This identification, however, can never be complete. If, on the one hand, the women’s location and lighter skin color puts them in a position of relative privilege in Brazil, on the other, their participation in a global middle-class identity is impaired by a disadvantaged position in the hierarchy of nations. The relationship of the peripheral middle class to the centers of power is subject to debate. In Gupta’s work on transnational imagined communities, for example, the elite and middle class of the Global South seem only to mimic their northern counterparts. In contrast, Partha Chatterjee (1993), in his analysis of the Indian case, argues that nationalism in the colonies cannot be described as an imitation of na- Middle-Class Trajectories 33 tionalism in the colonial centers but is defined based “on difference” from the centers, in the context of anticolonial struggles, as a “domain of sovereignty of civil society.” According to Chatterjee, the idea of nation in India entails two different spheres: the material and the spiritual . In the...