Dr Antonio da Silva, from the Department of Hispanic Studies, has just had a book published by Palgrave Macmillan, entitled The ‘Femme’ Fatale in Brazilian Cinema: Challenging Hollywood Norms.
The femme fatale has long been constructed and understood in popular culture and cinema as a beautiful heterosexual Caucasian woman that belongs to film noir and neo-noir. Antonio’s book shows the need to incorporate diverse ethnic groups and gay men into the range of femmes fatales. He examines how the Brazilian representations cross genre, gender, race, and class and offer alternative instances to the dominant Hollywood Caucasian model. As with gender performativity, the danger the femme fatale represents to society is constructed rather than being an innate feature. The figure represents areas of cultural anxiety, particularly around issues of sexuality and gender, but Antonio seeks to reframe these issues in the context of Brazilian film.
For more information about the book, please see the Palgrave Macmillan webpage here: www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=746918