Dados Bibliográficos

Resumo

In this essay on working-class families in a Brazilian, urban neighborhood, it is considered how, through jokes and gossip about sexual transgressions, men and women use and are affected by culturally accepted definitions of masculinity. Focusing on spontaneous speech events and placing the husband-wife relationship within a social context in which mothers and sisters exert an enormous influence over their male relatives, new dimensions of male-female power relations are glimpsed that might be overlooked by methodologies more centered on hegemonic norms. The observations suggest that particular economic and political circumstances have contributed to a situation in which images of masculine honor, although ostensibly reinforcing male privileges, are wielded by women as effective weapons against their husbands as well as against female rivals.

Referências Citadas