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Their motivation to migrate and to work as erotic dancers can also be understood in the context of a representational system, inaugurated in colonial times, that emphasizes the exoticism of Brazilian women--their bodies, their skin tone, their sexuality. These stereotypes are the props that Brazilian women use to construct their performances in Manhattan and Queens gentlemen's bars and the language through which they negotiate their relationships to society at large.
Transnational Desires focuses on the lives of nine Brazilian dancers with whom the author, herself a middle-class Brazilian, developed close relationships over the years. Maia examines their social relations both in the bar scene and with family, friends, and lovers outside. She shows that for these women erotic dancing is part of a life trajectory that involves negotiating their social position and life prospects in a fundamentally transnational social universe.
Suzana Maia is Professor of Anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Reconcavo da Bahia (UFRB), Brazil. She received her PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
"In the face of the hurricane of prejudice and opinion surrounding the topics of 'sexual exploitation' and 'human trafficking,' Suzana Maia's Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New York comes as a breath of fresh air, dealing as it does with a numerically large group of sex workers who have been ignored by policy makers and moral entrepreneurs alike: middle-class, female immigrants."
--American Anthropologist
"Most of us aim to represent the particular quality and complexity of the lives of the people we study. This fine ethnography comes as close to that end as one can hope."
--Journal of Anthropological Research
"An exceptional study based on long-term field research of the highest quality, Transnational Desires is especially effective in situating the exotic (erotic dancing) within the mundane (the daily lives of the women who are its focus). Maia manages to contextualize the lives of her informants in their more complex existence not just as workers at the bars, but as people struggling to construct meaningful lives, building projects for the present and the future, trying to find happiness in often difficult circumstances. Her description of their emotional relationships, their struggles and searches, should make this an instant classic."
--Richard G. Parker, author of Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil
"With remarkable sensitivity, respect, and, yes, friendliness, Suzana Maia follows the lives of nine middle class Brazilian women who came to New York City to work as dancers in gentlemen's clubs, where they earn far more than in Brazil and are able to maintain the standard of living--the class position--they cherish. Through the telling detail, Maia contrasts their attitudes toward the body, sex, love, fun, and intimacy with those of mainstream America. She captures the contorted plays of desire, the misperceptions, the illusions, the fantasies, the hopes, and the trenchant pragmatism produced by a transcultural life that echoes neo-colonial and neo-liberal arrangements. An unforgettable book."
--Vincent Crapanzano, author of The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals
"This study of middle-class Brazilian women, their border-crossing migratory experiences as colored by their experiences of class, sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, and nationality in New York City and Brazil, and their work choices (erotic dancing is better than domestic work) is absolutely fascinating. It is also a 'good read,' full of unexpected twists, sensitive interpretation, rich ethnography, and insightful socioeconomic contextualization."
--Nicole Constable, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
"Maia achieves a brilliant intersectional analysis, showing how the articulation between gender, class, sexuality, and nationality [...] is at the core of the permanent process of producing the differences that mark the subjectivities and corporealities of these women. [...] [E]ssential reading for scholars interested in the border crossing and dislocation of Brazilian women as well as for those concerned with understanding how the articulation between categories of difference functions in the relations between the overlapping transnational sex and marriage markets."
--Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
"[Maia's] ethnography is an important contribution to the continually expanding anthropological study of sex work, but it should also be essential reading for those who are interested in the complexities of migration, gendered labor, and the negotiation of identity."
--Anthropology of Work Review
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