Product details
- ISBN 9780857287977
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 153 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2011
- Publisher: Anthem Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Based on a year’s research from within a Brazilian slum, this study follows a series of unemployed women who watch up to six hours of telenovelas a day, often in the midst of arduous physical labour in the home. The women suffer in relation to their bodies, but simultaneously invest in a masochistic glorification of suffering that links their lives to the soap operas, revealing disturbing valuations of the female body that traverse reality and fiction. Through its exploration of this daily integration of real suffering and fictional glamour and wealth, ‘Body Parts on Planet Slum’ reveals how fantasy and social exclusion can together induce a form of psychological survivalism, enabling these women to reconfigure the central features of their existence – their suffering, pleasure, sexuality and embodiment.
Lisa Beljuli Brown is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She gained her PhD in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.
