Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity

By Amelia Simpson

Book Overview

A fascinating new book... that] offers a lucid academic critique of Xuxa's persona. --Entertainment WeeklyFormer Playboy centerfold and soft-porn movie actress Xuxa (SHOO-sha) emerged in the 1980s as Brazil's mass media megastar. Through her children's television show, which reaches millions of people in Latin America and the United States, this blond sex symbol has attained extraordinary cultural authority. Reaching far beyond younger audiences, Xuxa's show informs the culture at large about gender relations, racial democracy, and idealized beauty.Backed by Brazil's TV Globo, the fourth-largest commercial network in the world, Xuxa has built an empire. Amelia Simoson's colorful portrayal is the first book to explore how Xuxa's representation of femininity, her privileging of a white ideal of beauty, and her promotional approach to culture perpetuate inequality on an unprecedented scale. Simpson's thoughtful analysis exposes the complicity of a mass audience eager to celebrate Xuxa's deeply compromised representations of gender, race, and modernity.Xuxa also explores the meaning behind the myth--Xuxa's long-term relationship with Brazil's soccer idol, Pela(r), and the near-worship of her atypical blond, blue-eyed appearance by Brazil's population. As the author examines Xuxa's suggestive style juxtaposed with juvenile entertainment, and the phenomenon of Xuxa-look-alike teenaged paquitas, she unfold the symbolic territory of blond sex symbols worldwide.Simpson has brought the facts and persona of Xuxa together in this well-documented, well-written analysis of the Brazilian superstar. She touches bases on gender, race, and changing patterns in Brazil. Xuxa is rich with information, laced with insight about the methods, practices and abuses that abound with the marketing of a personality and its products, and the effect of TV on all who watch it, especially the children.--News from Brazil"

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566391016
• ISBN13: 9781566391016
• Release Date: August 1993
• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Xuxa is not to blame for Brazil's problems or the troubles of America's feminists

Don't blame Xuxa for Brazil's problems. They are the result of American corporate fascism's take-over of the country. The screed of American feminist puritanism is a joke. They hate Xuxa because she loves children instead of aborting them.

Puts the Xuxa phenomenon into perspective

Xuxa's syndicated show on American TV may have been a flop, but this scholarly book remains an interesting study of the Brazilian entertainer. Amelia Simpson interleaves biographical information with background material on the Brazilian entertainment industry, combined with a very insightful analysis of Xuxa's incredible fame among the impoverished populations of South America. At times the writing comes across a little bit like a thesis composed by an overly earnest grad student. This has, to some extent, the odd effect of legitimizing Xuxa's appeal as transcending that of a mere pop culture icon. If anybody was truly qualified to play Evita, it is Xuxa. She was, after all, born very close to the border of Argentina.