What have advertising and the press taught us to see in Black women’s bodies?

For decades, advertising used women’s bodies to sell products. But this objectification did not affect all women in the same way. Racism also helped determine which bodies would be associated with power, prestige, and belonging, and which would be presented primarily as sources of pleasure and/or objects of consumption.

In the advertisements collected here, white women appear as leaders, investors, and mothers. They can choose where to invest their money, represent fashion, or embody family well-being. In the images of Black women, the focus is on their bodies, sensuality, and Carnival.

In the press, this framing also emerges through words. Manchete magazine’s 1983 coverage presents a Carnival dancer as a “Black goddess” and, in another photograph, draws attention to her anatomy. The framing and caption direct the audience’s gaze toward her body, pushing her life story, work, and the knowledge involved in dance into the background. These images were analyzed by historian Claudielle Pavão da Silva in an article published on Geledés.

This selection illustrates a broader issue. The study A Família Margarina Recebe Visitas, by Luiz Augusto Campos, Marcelle Felix, and João Feres Júnior, analyzed more than 24,000 advertisements from a sample of Veja magazine issues published between 1968 and 2017. The findings reveal persistent racial inequalities: white people predominate and are more frequently associated with beauty, luxury, and prestige. Black women are the least represented group.

The familiar figure of Globeleza also belongs in this discussion: how much space did the media give Black women to be recognized beyond the body that danced and inspired desire?

Sensuality can be a form of freedom and self-expression. The issue arises when it becomes an imposed expectation that limits the ways a woman can be recognized.

A Carne, as performed by Elza Soares, offers a way to think about this hierarchy of value. Being desired does not mean being respected. Having one’s body in the spotlight does not guarantee that one’s voice, individuality, and rights receive the same recognition.

What consequences might this gaze have? What expectations of sexual availability does it fuel? How might it shape perceptions of competence and authority?

Revisiting these images means asking which women we have learned to recognize as people with desires, work, families, and choices, and which we have learned to see primarily as bodies available for the desire of others.

Image sources and visual research:

• Mesbla, 1994; Bausch & Lomb, 1985; Nacional Visa, 1994; Banespa, 1981: advertisements identified by the Propagandas em Revistas archive as having appeared in Veja.

• Bamerindus, 1992: advertisement published in Playboy. Research and reproduction: Propagandas em Revistas.

• Antarctica featuring Sargentelli, 1984: reproduction from the Propagandas Históricas archive.

• Globeleza, Valéria Valenssa, 1996: photograph from the Memória Globo archive. Credit: Globo.

• Two images of Carnival dancers, Manchete, February 1983, p. 25: original source listed as Biblioteca Nacional. Reproductions and analysis by Claudielle Pavão da Silva on Geledés, 2021.

Research reference: A Família Margarina Recebe Visitas: Branquitude e publicidade em cinco décadas (1968–2017) [The Margarine Family Receives Visitors: Whiteness and Advertising Across Five Decades (1968–2017)], Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 2023. Accessed through the Observatório da Branquitude.