Detalhes do Documento

This essay analyses two works by the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004): a short f ilm titled Eat Me: a Gula ou a Luxúria? (Eat Me: Gluttony or Lust?, 1975) and a related installation (1976). Both reference advertising and contain erotic images of women. I discuss these works in relation to the Brazilian television and film industries of the 1960s–1980s, including Brazilian pornography and erotica, deemed a threat to traditional values by the country’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), despite its inconsistent approach to censoring them. I suggest that Pape appropriates and satirizes—or “cannibalizes”—ads and pornography as to resist the dictatorship’s conservative sex and gender ideologies. Though Pape did not consider herself a feminist, I argue that her Eat Me film and installation present a feminist critique of the heteronormative and patriarchal discourses undergirding the dictatorship and the Brazilian mass media’s commodification of women and sex, especially in advertising and pornochanchadas (sex comedies).