AbstractsSociology

Brazil is known for believing in the concept of racial democracy, which is the idea that Brazil is free of racial discrimination. At the heart of racial democracy lies the mulata, the Brazilian woman of mixed racial descent. This project investigates which discourses that constitute the way this mulata woman is represented in the documentary Mulatas! Um Tufão nos Quadris. The film will be compared with Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves in order to gain a wider perspective of Brazilian racial relations. The theoretical framework of this project is based on the postcolonial concepts of representation and stereotypes by Stuart Hall. The analysis is structured by Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This project concludes that there are various ambiguous discourses constituting the representation of the mulata. Furthermore, that racial discrimination of mulatas exists simultaneously with her being praised as symbol of Brazilian.