Decolonization of the Brazilian Woman

An invitation to rethink distorted representations of gender and tourism in the Global North

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to produce a critical review of a scientific article published in the Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa em Turismo (a brazilian journal of tourism and research). The study under review adopted a qualitative approach grounded in a postcolonial perspective, drawing on Spivak's notion of subalternity, and rejected positivist epistemologies so as not to reinforce the asymmetry experienced by the Global South. Data collection consisted of 14 in-depth interviews with Brazilian women between 20 and 50 years of age, all of whom held or were pursuing higher education degrees and had tourism-related experiences in Global North countries. The primary objective was to examine how these female tourists are subalternized by foreigners, by investigating the mechanisms of silencing, stereotyping, and epistemic violence that operate upon them. The main findings revealed that: (i) subalternization occurs through stereotypes that reduce these women to fixed representations; (ii) within a Eurocentric framework, these women can be neither fully "women" nor fully "Brazilian," as both their nationality and gender place them in a position of epistemic inferiority; and (iii) the study critiques the marketing and tourism literature for reproducing hegemonic approaches from the Global North, thereby reinforcing colonial hierarchies, and advocates for the need to decolonize the imaginaries, discourses, and theoretical models prevailing in the field.