Brazilian whiteness on the global stage

Rio’s famed beaches have become internationally renowned locations representing “the good life,” which includes long hours of leisure, sociality, and flirtation under the sun (Banck Reference Banck1994; Barickman Reference Barickman2009, Reference Barickman, Kraay and McCann2022; Farias Reference Farias2007). As Freeman (Reference Freeman2002, 26) notes, “The beach is Rio’s stage”—the place to see and be seen. In the 1960s, the famous song “The Girl from Ipanema” popularized and entextualized one of Brazil’s proudest pairings: the tanned (white) woman at the beach (Farias Reference Farias2007, 264).

Brazil has leaned into promoting its worldly “sophistication” through music like bossa nova and global superstars like Gisele Bündchen, Xuxa, and Carmen Miranda—the country’s most famous white exports (Bishop-Sanchez Reference Bishop-Sanchez2016; Dennison Reference Dennison2013; Maia Reference Maia2012; Simpson Reference Simpson1993). But Brazil has also sought to cash in on its reputation as “magnificently miscegenated” (Freyre Reference Freyre1986; see also Davis Reference Davis1999; Edmonds Reference Edmonds2010) by putting on display hypersexualized brown and Black women’s bodies (Eakin Reference Eakin2017; Turner Reference Turner2017). In an article describing how Brazil commodified the bunda (butt), Boscatti (Reference Boscatti2021, 42) analyzes how Brazil nationalized women’s racialized and sexualized bodies as part of their global brand—as natural elements that had been turned into marketable goods like Argentinian meat or Brazilian coffee (see Pinho Reference Pinho2022). Afro-Brazilian feminists have long decried Freyre’s romanticization of miscegenation that ignores Brazil’s history of antiblackness, colonial rape, and ongoing tolerance of sexual violence (Barreto Reference Barreto2020–2021; Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2020; Ribeiro Reference Ribeiro2019). Scholars have also linked the transnational circulation of these sexualized images of Brazilian women to sex tourism (Williams Reference Williams2013), “the mulata as export” (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2020), and “the mulata as consumable” (Gilliam and Gilliam Reference Gilliam and Gilliam1999; see also Caldwell Reference Caldwell2007; Giacomini Reference Giacomini2006; Pravaz Reference Pravaz2003, Reference Pravaz2009; Tenório Reference Tenório2022). The body of the mulata was presented as “the height of female attractiveness, as the perfect embodiment of the heat and sensuality of the tropics, and as a representation of Brazil itself” (Pravaz Reference Pravaz2009, 84).

In 2016, when all eyes were on Rio de Janeiro as the first Latin American host city of the Summer Olympics, Brazil strategically showcased both of these gendered and racialized images. Anitta, then twenty-three years young, joined the legendary singers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in the reproduction of a Carnival parade that featured traditional Brazilian samba music and over a thousand dancers and drummers in a colorful and joyous celebration.Footnote ⁶ The frenetic energy of this finale contrasted sharply with an earlier number in which Daniel Jobim, grandson of composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, played “Garota de Ipanema” on a baby grand piano off to the side of the stage. The entire stadium of Maracanã went dark, and a spotlight followed the blond and leggy Brazilian supermodel Gisele as she catwalked the length of the entire soccer field alone for nearly two minutes.Footnote ⁷ The pairing of the song with the girl was meant to be iconic, even if the world-famous Gisele is not actually from Ipanema or even from Rio. As tens of thousands of Brazilian fans sang along to the lyrics in Portuguese live in the stadium, the television announcer reminded millions of home viewers that “The Girl from Ipanema” is the second most famous song in the world.Footnote ⁸ Throughout the slow-paced and lulling piano-accompanied melody, there was nowhere to look but at Gisele, once voted “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”Footnote ⁹

White and blond Heloísa (Helô) Pinheiro is credited as the source of inspiration for the original song (“Garota de Ipanema”). Now in her seventies, she continues to good-naturedly take pictures with tourists at the restaurant where the famous composers Vinícius de Moraes and Tom Jobim immortalized her as the vision of Brazilian beauty. As she and others tell the story, she was a seventeen-year-old girl who sometimes entered the Veloso bar and café to purchase cigarettes for her mother and frequently passed by on her daily walk to the beach. She never noticed the musicians and did not know she was the inspiration for the song until several years later. This endearing and innocent backstory parallels Gisele Bündchen’s “spotting.” Gisele had been taking modeling classes with her sisters in Horizontina, a small town in Rio Grande do Sul, a southern state home to many families of German origin like her own. On a free trip to São Paulo with a large group of girls from the modeling class, she was “discovered” by a modeling agent at age thirteen while eating at McDonald’s in a shopping mall.

Gisele and Helô’s well-known “rise-to-fame” stories illustrate how visibility capital relies on and naturalizes the desire to look at whiteness—even in a country like Brazil. Unexplored within these simplistic but well-loved stories are questions of how structural inequality, global beauty norms, and beliefs in white superiority impact a person’s ability to get noticed in the first place. Perhaps even more importantly, they suggest that there is a meritocratic rationale behind “finding” a person and seeing their future potential. Intentionally critiquing this global aesthetic hierarchy and ranking of human worth, Anitta and fita tanners do not patiently wait to be “discovered” in the marginalized city spaces they frequent.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, they turn to practices like fita tanning to actively capitalize on their newfound ability to create visibility capital by diverting attention in a look economy.

Jasmine Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2020, 179) notes that even in its most recent bid for international acclaim through the 2016 Olympics, Brazil continued to use the iconography of the mulata to sell itself as “an erotic playground” and “a multiracial paradise of passion, sensuality, and adventure.” But while Brazil seeks to court heterosexual male tourism through the implied sale of brown and Black women’s bodies, feminist theorists remind us that there are critical distinctions that must be made when women explore and embody sexuality for their own empowerment. In these cases, women become “focused agents of their corporeal expression” (McCoy-Torres Reference McCoy-Torres2017, 186) and embrace “forms of self that exceed capture” (Musser Reference Musser2018, 2). Musser (Reference Musser2018, 2), in particular, explains how this process involves “citing” but not “becoming.” Anitta and fita tanners are uninterested in becoming the mulata who performs for paying customers by dancing in samba shows, parading naked during Carnival, or engaging in prostitution and sexual tourism. Nor can they entirely subvert a racial beauty hierarchy that still idolizes whiteness. But by flaunting and publicly displaying their enjoyment of their sexualized nonwhite bodies, they gain valuable visibility on their own terms.

“We don’t look like models”: Diverting the white supremacist gaze

Sixty years after the recording of “The Girl from Ipanema,” Anitta released the song “Girl from Rio” and an accompanying music video in which she cosplays the more conservative and “proper” era of the original song.Footnote ¹¹ She includes scenes of herself in modest pastel bathing attire and male backup dancers outfitted in one-piece bathing suits and clean white sailor suits in front of an obviously fake and muted backdrop of the beach and the famous Pão de Açucar cable car (Figure 3). A uniformed chauffer drives her to the beach in a fancy black convertible. Even though she is heading to the beach, she wears gloves, as white wealthy women used to do in Rio to protect their highly valued fair skin from the sun (Barickman Reference Barickman2009, Reference Barickman, Kraay and McCann2022). Anitta is playacting the kind of carioca (Rio resident) who has frequented these famous South Zone beaches for generations. In real life, she became a professional singer who performed at illegal funk dances (called proibidas) as a teenager before she even visited the beaches that international tourists flock to in her home city. As the pace of the music picks up and the color scheme in the video changes, she cuts to scenes of “a different Rio; the one I’m from but not the one that you know; the one you meet when you don’t have no “real” (the Brazilian currency).”Footnote ¹²

Figure 3.

Anitta evokes a nostalgic Ipanema past as she poses along an imagined Rio beachfront, replete with the iconic mosaic sidewalk and Rio’s famous cable car up to Pão de Açúcar in the background. Credit: Still image from Anitta’s “Girl from Rio” music video, released April 30, 2021.

The beach in “a different Rio” is not a famous South Zone beach like Ipanema, but the man-made Piscinão de Ramos, and the shots include vibrant, pulsating scenes of beach life, replete with the kinds of behavior frowned upon by white middle-class beachgoers (Freeman Reference Freeman2002, Reference Freeman2008; Paixão and Leite Reference Paixão and Leite1996; Roth-Gordon Reference Roth-Gordon2017).Footnote ¹³ Families have barbecues and eat large, messy meals; women bleach their body hair by painting heavy white cream onto their arms and legs with brushes; and people participate in rough-and-tumble activities that might disturb others, like splashing water, playing loud music, threatening to fight, and engaging in very public displays of (heterosexual) affection.Footnote ¹⁴ All these beach practices blur the boundaries between public and private space and intentionally violate public “decorum.” Illegal activity (jumping out of bus windows to avoid paying the fare) and stigmatized life choices (“babies having babies like it doesn’t matter”) are both shown and discussed in the lyrics. Her skimpy electric-blue one-piece bathing suit is a dizzying set of lines and cutouts that resemble fita tape straps and reveal more surface area than they cover (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Wearing her contrasting “modern” look in the “Girl from Rio” music video, Anitta poses under an outdoor shower on the sand at Piscinão de Ramos. Credit: Still image from Anitta’s Girl from Rio music video, released April 30, 2021.

In the song, Anitta foregrounds her roots in a low-income comunidade, name-dropping (as rappers do) the North Zone neighborhood, Honório Gurgel, where she grew up. Moving beyond the original song lyrics that describe the ideal Brazilian woman as “tall and tan and young and lovely,” she unapologetically fills the screen with women of different body types who display a range of favela aesthetics (including bright clothing, tattoos, and long acrylic nails). The music video continues in the vein of some of her previous videos, foregrounding “real-life” scenes of favela and suburban residents that celebrate racial diversity and cellulite—a choice that provoked much public discussion after she refused to allow touch-ups in the close-ups of her jiggling butt in short shorts in the opening scene of the song “Vai Malandra.” Musical styles square off in “Girl from Rio” as the relaxed samba style of bossa nova and calm, choreographed, “proper,” and chaste dance scenes are juxtaposed to a pop funk sound, favela energy, and sexual movement. Anitta uses the song to continue her quest to introduce the world to Brazilian funk—“the demonized soundtrack of Brazilian favelas” (Pinho Reference Pinho and Seigel2018, 159).Footnote ¹⁵ While clearly intended for a wider audience with its reference to “gringos” and the inclusion of English lyrics, the song was also wildly popular domestically, despite (or because of) its “critique of Brazil’s self-curation” (Goldschmitt Reference Goldschmitt2022, 514).

Race is central to this struggle over the Brazil on display: Anitta may be light-skinned, but she would not be considered “white white” in Brazil (Pinho Reference Pinho2009; Roth-Gordon Reference Roth-Gordon2017), and her connections to Rio’s marginalized spaces and musical genres help disrupt what Simpson (Reference Simpson1993, 164) describes as the “tyranny of the blonde” (see also Cottom Reference Cottom2023). As songs like “Garota de Ipanema” and “Ai Se Eu Te Pego” have made clear for decades, nonwhite women from the periphery aren’t the ones famous composers or pop stars generally write songs about, and they aren’t often the ones chosen to represent their city or nation to the world. As Anitta helps fita tanning go viral, and community aesthetics like fita help bolster Anitta’s favela brand (Freire-Medeiros and Cohen Reference Freire-Medeiros and Cohen2015; Robb Larkins Reference Robb Larkins2015), both creatively challenge Brazil’s white supremacist gaze.Footnote ¹⁶

Selling the sun: Buying tan lines

As the É o Tchan lyrics that open this section suggest, fita, as a relatively new favela aesthetic, has generated income for hundreds of women across Brazil. Personal bronzers—women who now make their living as full-time personal tanners—sometimes work out of their homes, with tanning beds or ultraviolet lights that line the walls of small rooms, and they run small salons, where women can lay out on the rooftop or in a yard after getting their bikini constructed.Footnote ¹⁸ Personal bronzers sell the sun, and they do not lack for customers: Women, young and old, and from a range of racial categories and identities, are pursuing a specific bronzed or tanned “look” that radiates signs of leisure often associated with Rio’s more iconic spaces.Footnote ¹⁹ It is a personal tanner’s job to encourage women to engage in “bio-investment” (Pussetti Reference Pussetti2021), not only to build her own self-esteem but also to accrue attention in a look economy. Describing the skin as a readable sign, Ahmed (Reference Ahmed, Shildrick and Price1998, 51) notes, “the gaze of the other fixes the woman’s skin as a commodifiable sign of her body-value.”

Personal bronzers exemplify Kathleen Millar’s (Reference Millar2018) concept of form of living, whereby women not only “make a living” through a job but also engage in work that upholds their values, future aspirations, and a particular view of the world. Women who work in fita are often entrepreneurs running their own business, finding their own clients, and sometimes hiring other women to assist them. They often appreciate the job’s flexibility, despite the long hours and the competition they face. One personal tanner who had trained assistants who later opened up their own competing stalls noted cheerfully that she couldn’t serve all of the women waiting anyway, and “o sol brilha pra todo mundo!” (The sun shines for everyone!).

Tanners sometimes got creative with their electrical tape designs, creating logos to market their brand. Other times, they decorated bikinis for holidays—green, yellow, and blue for Brazilian holidays or soccer games—or created themed bikinis for Carnival costumes. Attracting looks was important for building their brand and running a successful business, but it also was the “product” they were selling. Killer tan lines could change how clients felt when looking at their own bodies; they also increased clients’ self-esteem by attracting positive affirmation from others. While the highly sexualized bikinis were sometimes created for the admiration of romantic partners or husbands (“People say that I save marriages!”; see also Vannini and McCright Reference Vannini and McCright2004), they were just as often about empowering women through accessible and affordable methods of bodily alteration (Novacich Reference Novacich2021; see also Miller Reference Miller2003). Through the simple application of electrical tape and exposure to the sun’s rays, butts could be lifted, breasts shaped, waists narrowed, and hips accentuated. Tanners explained to us how carefully drawn lines impose symmetry on a body, even out discoloration, and call attention to anyone’s ability to model an ideal body shape: Once the tape is peeled off, a picture-perfect bikini remains on the body—in the color of one’s “virgin” skin (Novacich Reference Novacich, Forte and Hwa2022). Perfect tan lines allow anyone, with the exception of the unfortunate few whose fair skin only burned (Farias Reference Farias2007), to engage in the visual, aesthetic, and embodied pleasure (Borgerson and Schroeder Reference Borgerson and Schroeder2018; Felski Reference Felski2006; McCoy-Torres Reference McCoy-Torres2017) of skin that appeared to “glow” after exposure to the sun.

Despite the well-known warnings about skin cancer, tans continue to suggest health and well-being (Coupland and Coupland Reference Coupland and Coupland1997; Paris Reference Paris2008; Vannini and McCright Reference Vannini and McCright2004). But above all, even in a city like Rio, where the sun shines year-round and millions of residents can get to free public beaches, tans continue to signify access to leisure, time off from work, and the luxury of idleness or even tourism (Ahmed Reference Ahmed, Shildrick and Price1998; Cocks Reference Cocks2013; Coupland and Coupland Reference Coupland and Coupland1997; Prasad Reference Prasad2018). Personal tanners outside of Rio or far from the South Zone sometimes work to create the visual and experiential effect of hosting their clients on one of Brazil’s world-famous beaches, playing themed music, offering them picolés (popsicles) and água de coco (coconut water, a popular beach treat), and even decorating their rooftops with the famous mosaic floor tile of Copacabana’s boardwalk. Although fita bikinis are associated with distant and decidedly not “modern” spaces given the social significance and self-constructed nature of the laje (Freire-Medeiros and Name Reference Freire-Medeiros and Name2019; Jarrín Reference Jarrín2017), the practice of tanning in Brazil is still associated with Rio’s famed beaches. By setting the scene, personal bronzers offered their clients the chance to look like a celebrity or to embody the iconic “Girl from Ipanema.” One client described taking a motorcycle taxi to get up the hill to a tanning salon in Rocinha and told us she felt just like Anitta in her music video. Participation in these beauty rituals and symbolic proximity to the rich and famous made it easier “to be seen as someone who counts” (Machado-Borges Reference Machado-Borges2009, 232).

While a good tan indicated time and energy spent working on one’s body, the sharp lines of fita bikinis also hinted at someone else’s labor. One woman named Diva who worked as a faxineira in a luxury condo building proudly showed us the fita tan lines hidden under her uniform. Even as she performed domestic labor for other people, signs that she also received services as a paying client were imprinted onto her body. As another fita tanner told us, “Even if you only go twice a month, you stay tanned forever. It looks like you go to the beach every day, but no, you just have done professional tanning. So, from the moment you make your appointment, it just makes your whole week.” Like more expensive and permanent plastic surgery procedures (Edmonds Reference Edmonds2007, Reference Edmonds2010; Jarrín Reference Jarrín2017), tanning is part of a public “right to beauty” that is available to all in Brazil. Turning one’s body “brown” (morena) is still commonly considered a perfeição do corpo (achieving perfection of the body; see Farias Reference Farias2007, 264; Pravaz Reference Pravaz2009). One professional bronzer designed a special tape bikini with a flap that lifted up for an assistant who had just had a baby. Even a breastfeeding mother from Rio’s racial, geographic, and social periphery could curtir o sol (enjoy or make good use of the sun) and display bodily evidence of her right to be seen and admired.

Because public display is central in a look economy, professionals spend time crafting not only looks but also their social media presence (Figure 5; Novacich Reference Novacich2023). Fita tanners similarly make no efforts to hide their participation in what is a whole-body beauty ritual: Mirrors outside fita beach stands allow women to reposition tape and check their tan lines. When women choose to tan at Ramos in fita bikinis and engage in the care of their bodies in such a public space (applying lotions, taking pictures, and checking themselves out in front of a mirror), they engage in what Krista Thompson (Reference Thompson2015, 10) calls “shared performances of visibility—practices that involve staging the act of being seen and being seen in the process of being seen” (see also Shipley Reference Shipley2015). Celebrities, especially funk stars, often post very revealing pictures of themselves in fita bikinis. Jojo Todynho, who named herself after the popular brand of chocolate milk and promotes unapologetic blackness and body positivity for large curvy women, reminds viewers of her bodily value as she goes viral with a selfie taken in front of a mirror: “Acho que a marquinha tá de milhões. Ui!” (My tan lines look like a million bucks. Woohoo!).Footnote ²⁰ As Machado-Borges (Reference Machado-Borges2009, 230) notes in the article “Producing Beauty in Brazil: Vanity, Visibility, and Social Inequality,” in Brazilian Portuguese, “vanity is sometimes used almost as synonymous to self-esteem, self-respect and pride.” To look at oneself and admire brownness (especially publicly) is an act that subverts the white supremacist gaze.

Figure 5.

Erika Bronze on her famous laje, taking a selfie with fita tanners for her social media account. Credit: Marcelo Costa Braga

Erika Bronze’s salon in Realengo is as geographically and socially distant from Rio’s “center stage” beaches as the Piscinão de Ramos. Given the lack of scenic waves and picturesque rainforest-covered mountains, Erika has added wall after wall of Instagrammable murals. Glow-in-the-dark graffiti has been painted on black walls in the tanning room to accent the rows of bright UV purple bulbs. A larger-than-life painting of Anitta in the fita bikini that Erika Bronze herself constructed for the “Vai Malandra” video adorns the entrance to the stairs up to the laje (Figure 6). While there are no “The Girl from Ipanema” beach scenes, there are multiple murals (including in the bathroom) that feature the iconically colorful hillside favelas, as well as hand-painted renderings of elaborate feathered and jeweled Carnival costumes to pose in front of. Any or all of these work as scenic favela glam backdrops for a woman’s big “reveal.” On our very first visit to Erika’s salon, we were approached to film these short video clips, holding a woman’s cell phone as she carefully peeled off the top part of the black tape on her chest after hours of tanning to triumphantly show the shocking color contrast she had achieved. First-timers sometimes performed a dramatic, slow, full-body spin to show themselves “dressed” in their electrical tape bikini. Through these “spectacular forms of image-making” (Thompson Reference Thompson2015, 9), fita tanners could feel like models and celebrities who engaged in “glamour labor” (Wissinger Reference Wissinger2015).

Figure 6.

Mural depicting Anitta in fita from the video “Vai Malandra” graces the walls of Erika Bronze’s tanning salon in Realengo. Tanners often pose and take selfies in front of her colorful murals. Credit: Marcelo Costa Braga

All this looking and being looked at creates visibility capital through the blending of both in-person and digital attention. Women sometimes overtly play with this semiotic negotiation of bodily value through the cooptation of high-prestige, status goods. For example, at salons like Erika Bronze’s, one can choose an electrical tape “decal” to stick on one’s butt cheek, creating a tatuagem solar, or temporary solar tattoo, through the contrast between tanned and untanned skin. One woman we found on Instagram chose a Macintosh Apple logo. Another woman posted videos of her fita bikini, which was constructed out of thin strips of white electrical tape stamped with the repeating brand logo for Louis Vuitton, effectively creating what we imagine would be an unexpected new product line for the company. Through these choices, women mock the clear distinction between the fake and the real and the symbolism of a tan (see also Roth-Gordon and Robb Larkins Reference Roth-Gordon and Robb Larkins2025). They may tan in “distant” suburban salons on concrete lajes and beside man-made lakes that are far from Rio’s celebrated natural coastline, but they too can attract attention for bikini tan lines that are seen by many as “the birthright of the Rio resident” (Farias Reference Farias2007, 281; see also Gomes and Silva Reference Gomes and Camargo Silva2022).

“Maior energia da gostosa”: Hypervisible sexuality as a superpower

The tiny triangles of tape in a fita bikini cover very little, and they hint at intimacy and proximity to what are usually inaccessible parts of a stranger’s body. “Se o biquini não for P eu nem quero!” (If the bikini isn’t size small, I don’t want it!), funk star Jojo Todynho proclaimed, showing off her curvy body on social media during a fita tanning session.Footnote ²¹ On one of our visits to her salon, Erika Bronze called out to her daughter, who was preparing to construct our research assistant’s bikini: “Make hers small enough to give someone a heart attack!” Often the tape covered little more than nipples, genitals, and the butt crack. Even if sexual desirability and availability are not every tanner’s intended message, there is no way to escape the fact that these bikinis are designed to draw attention to the body, to one’s status as a sensual and sexual being, and to one’s power to have an impact on others. This recalls the lyrics of the song “Ai Se Eu Te Pego”: “Delicia, delicia, assim você me mata” (Delicious, delicious, this is how you kill me). Given notions of propriety, even in Brazil, the ability to play with what is shown and what remains hidden is a source of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power that both Anitta and fita tanners flaunt.

Many women work to maximize the improper gaze that fita bikinis encourage: The hypervisible tan lines create a map on the body, and strapless or off-the-shoulder shirts (officially called tomara que caia, or “hope it falls” shirts) are frequently paired with fresh tan lines that circle one’s neck (halter-style) and drop directly down to these off-limits parts of the body. Low-rise jeans show off the thin tan lines that rise above the hips, similarly plunging to meet in an eventual V that must be imagined. While nearly the entire back is left exposed to tan, the smallest of triangles rises above the butt cheeks and hides the butt crack in a bikini style called asa delta, or “hang-glider.” This too can be made partly visible to nonintimates when paired with the right kind of jeans, and it leaves the hypersexualized, tanned butt fully exposed when in a G-string bikini or underwear. Anitta’s outfits in music videos and live, televised performances often feature pants that scoop low enough in the back to reveal her well-crafted skinny tan lines. Drawing on Bourdieu in a study of tanning in the very different sartorial context of the UK, Coupland and Coupland (Reference Coupland and Coupland1997, 19) note, “For body-culture to be enacted, bodies need to be seen. Similarly, bodies need to be ‘displayed’ and ‘advertised’ if they are to enter the relational market and realize their symbolic capital.” This kind of daily exposure is not difficult to achieve in laid-back and tropical Rio.

Even though it’s just tape and sun (or UV rays from a tanning machine), and even though they are simply pursuing a Brazilian and especially carioca (Rio) tradition, fita tanners are very aware that hypervisibility is their superpower. The goal is often to have the darkest and most visible tan lines possible and to embrace exaggeration. Fita tanning is widely understood as a form of ostentatious grooming because the lines are so strong, pronounced, and designed to chamar attenção or call attention to themselves. Some women told us that with fresh tan lines, their skin looks “neon” and sobre-salente (very salient)—not unlike the bodily “shine” that Rihanna proudly displays in her Fenty advertisements (Musser Reference Musser2023). Fita tanning also foregrounds intentional work on the body, as the lines are so perfectly straight and sharp that it is clear one has put in the effort to conquistar a marquinha (literally “conquer” or achieve a tan). Indeed, this is the part of tanning that requires the most work: To get sharp lines, the edges of the electrical tape bikinis are often black to better attract the sun, and bronzing products (creams and waxes) are applied most frequently outside the lines.

Tanning has been described as a kind of “all-body makeup,” in which one revels in the freedom to use your whole body as a canvas (see also Novacich Reference Novacich2021, Reference Novacich, Forte and Hwa2022, Reference Novacich2023). Some scholars have suggested that tanning is intended to highlight the original whiteness or lightness of one’s skin, and in other national, cultural, and historical contexts, it may be true that tanning is primarily a “white thing” that allows one to temporarily flirt with nonwhiteness (Ahmed Reference Ahmed, Shildrick and Price1998; Barickman Reference Barickman2009, Reference Barickman, Kraay and McCann2022; Cocks Reference Cocks2013; Dyer Reference Dyer1997). But in Brazil, and especially in Rio, it is widely understood that women of color are better positioned to draw on the power of their melanin to alter their bodies and to revel in the connections between flesh and sexuality. “Tadinha! Você é muito branquinha!” (Poor little thing! You are very white!), we heard one woman laugh to another, while another nearby lamented, “There’s not much you can do with that color!” Tourists who burn are routinely mocked as un-Brazilian. “It’s kind of funny,” one personal bronzer who sometimes attended gringos confided to our research assistant, “because they are really so white that when they tan, they just turn a normal [untanned] color.” Flipping the script on the “beauty” of white skin, women who engage in fita tanning unabashedly assert their own “sensuous and fleshy aspiration” (Prasad Reference Prasad2018, 103)—including the desire to have their skin seen and valued for its brownness.

Fully embracing funk’s controversial and “cheeky” style, Anitta offers an irreverent response to bossa nova’s affirmation of white “sophisticated” women who (like the music) “swing so cool and sway so gently.” She has made rebolado—a Brazilian version of twerking that is associated with samba and brown-skinned Carnival dancers—a signature feature of her performances.Footnote ²² In addition to a song titled “Bola Rebola,” one of her rebolado dance moves has inspired a TikTok dance. She frequently revs up her audience (including at high-profile global events) by asking, “Did you think I wasn’t going to shake my ass?”Footnote ²³ Using women’s gyrating bodies to increase views (and their own profit), two of the other Brazilian songs currently in the Billion Views Club feature male funk singers performing odes to the hypersexualized Brazilian butt. One of these songs, “Bum Bum Tam Tam,” includes the word for butt (bum bum) in the title—followed by a nonsensical but rhythmic chant tam tam. Both videos feature a cast of light-skinned women who dance and twerk for the lead singer and his male companions.Footnote ²⁴ The videos include shots of the men singing while seated and pointing to an uncomfortably close gyrating woman’s ass, playing to the heterosexual male gaze (Mulvey Reference Mulvey1975).

While these videos may seem similar to Anitta’s on the surface, feminist scholars have carefully unpacked the ways participation in West Indian dancehall allows opportunities for women to embody the erotic and affirm the power of female sexuality and sex appeal—without simply reifying male objectification (Cooper Reference Cooper2004). McCoy-Torres (Reference McCoy-Torres2017, 186) shows how, through dance, a woman can “claim ownership of one’s body and its external communication,” while Musser (Reference Musser2018, 3) describes “brown jouissance” as a way to “revel in fleshiness.” While Anitta and fita tanners may follow the lead of others who have built up visibility capital for the nation through promoting the supposedly seductive powers of multiracial Brazilian women, they “self-actualize and author” their own sensual and sexual selves (Lindsey Reference Lindsey2013, 56). Some object to using women’s bodies and sexuality as the path to female empowerment. And yet, as one woman told us, fita tanning offers her “maior energia da gostosa” (all the energy of a hot or desirable woman). As Brazilian tanners turn their skin a deep bronze or a new shade of dark brown, they bask in the glow of their own sexualized bodies.