Sex, Color, and Geography: Racialized Relations in Brazil and Its Predicaments

Sex and race have significantly affected the trajectories of Brazil's historical geographies and its contemporary racialized relations. Interpretations of gender, race, and color in Brazil have produced distinct racialized relations and diverse color categories in contrast to the rigid binary racial categories (i.e., black-white) traditionally used in the United States. In Brazil, racialized relations have traditionally remained cordial, giving life to the so-called myth of racial democracy, and were not shaped by formal legal boundaries as in the United States; however, racialized relations in Brazil were forged by deeply embedded informal bordersphysical and socioculturalcoupled with historical processes, which continue to appear in today's data on social inequality.