Brazilians Aren’t Objects
Two things that I’ve always known to be true about me were that, A) I was proud to be Brazilian, and B) I was in love with American TV.
Though Brazilian television has changed significantly over the years, when I was a teenager there were only soap operas available if I wanted to stick to the Brazilian channels (and that just didn’t cut it for me). Soap operas may have their appeal; but to a teenager, they’re not that exciting. There was the eternal Malhação, a Brazilian TV show about twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings playing teenagers in their last years of high school. In that way, Malhação fit the American standards that I was unconsciously looking for, and maybe that was why I liked it. Other than that, if I wanted to see attractive “teenagers” living lives far more glamorous and complicated than mine, I had to turn to American TV. And I did, religiously so, until I found myself obsessed with American TV and, by extension, American culture. There’s a popular website called OrangoTag in Brazil that tracks the shows you watch and in which episode you’re in, and it declared that I probably didn’t sleep. At one point in my senior year, I was watching around 20 different TV shows, and they were all American.
Of course, I was on the Shameless train as soon as it premiered. A show about a family struggling to find their way both as individuals and as a group touched me deeply. The brilliant Emmy Rossum being the lead character was another bonus. It was one of my favorite shows for years. A friend and I would meet during our lunch break to watch the new episode of the week, every week. It was our friendship ritual. We loved it so much.
Then in season two, Estefânia happened.
I don’t remember ever seeing a Brazilian character in an American TV show before, if I’m being honest. Later, there was a whole episode in Faking It to depict Brazilian culture, with topless ladies and body-obsessed super hot and low key brainless characters, as well as posters that had sayings in Spanish (in Brazil, we speak Portuguese). But that was after. Before, I didn’t know what to expect. In all my American TV-obsessed short life, I hadn’t ever seen a Brazilian character being properly portrayed, if depicted at all.
Of course, Estefânia wasn’t a central character by any means. She was a plot tool to overcomplicate Jimmy and Fiona’s love life. But I was still interested. I was hit with the sudden realization that I did want to have a Brazilian character in one of my favorite shows. I wanted to see her shine. I wanted to see her in pain. I wanted to see her existing in that universe because she was my only chance of cultural representation up to that point.
But nothing could’ve prepared me for Estefânia’s character. She was vapid, dull, abused, overly sexualized, and to top it all off, she was the daughter of a manipulative drug lord. Estefânia was only in the show because her father had forced Jimmy into marrying her so she could get a green card.
There are so many horrible things about this.
Putting aside the fact that marrying for a green card is an old and overplayed trope, let’s focus instead on how damaging the idea is that Brazilian women are sex-obsessed, up-for-grabs entities with no agency. In Shameless, the protagonist Fiona is one of the most layered characters on television, even though that’s not a luxury many female characters have. And in this show, in which a female protagonist is given so much agency and power over her own life — power to make mistakes, suffer the consequences, do the right things and feel the ecstasy that comes with that — in this show, they create a cardboard character of a Brazilian woman.
Estefânia doesn’t make choices. She loves Nando, who she constantly returns to regardless of the fact that he abuses her, which is never addressed properly. She’s a puppet in her father’s schemes. And though he may love her, her voice is still nonexistent when her father speaks. She exists for sex, for being pretty, for being mute, and for being the princess of violence. She’s deprived of any happiness or the choice to make mistakes. And with that, any personal growth given to many side characters in the show doesn’t apply to Estefânia.
I have many foreign friends, and one of my closest friends from abroad is British. We’ve been close friends for about two years, and the other day she told me that she’d been saving to come to Brazil and see me. She was excited, but her mother was against her coming because Brazil is “a dangerous place.”
Of course, Brazil has the potential t0 be dangerous. We have favelas, we have overpopulated prisons. We have history with a police force that fails to contain drug dealing, and drug lords armed to the teeth with the type of guns that our armies don’t even have. Brazil can be a dangerous place. But so can many other countries that are not depicted as only dangerous and that alone.
Paraphrasing the wonderful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the problem with the stereotypes are not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. I don’t doubt that women like Estefânia exist — that there are women out there protected by drug schemes while at the same time lacking any agency or control over their own lives. I don’t doubt that women like Estefânia are abused and stripped down of any dignity or possibility of happiness. With the numbers of Brazilian sex slaves going up, that is a sad reality that I definitely do not doubt exists.
But when that’s the only story you tell — when you only show one Brazilian character, and you show her as a pretty sexual object, then you’re painting a dangerous image for the rest of us.
Brazilians may or may not be sexual. Brazilians may or may not be pretty. But we are not objects.
I understood then that although it’s terrible to never see yourself on television, it’s even worse to see a poorly-drawn representation of yourself that depicts the worst stereotypes about you as all you can be.
