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Digest entry: 03/01/2023 @ 09:33 AM

NEXT WEDNESDAY 3/8 4:30PM: Consuming Theater, Engendering the Urban Public in c.1900 São Paulo, Brazil (Tammis Donovan)

March 8, 2023
4:30 PM in the VAC, Beam Classroom

Speaker: Aiala Levy. Assistant Professor, History, Latin American Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies, University of Scranton.

In Brazil during the early twentieth century, theater was crucial for the birth of consumer capitalism as well as gendered and raced ideas about the urban public. São Paulo’s theater impresarios targeted aspiring middle-class and upper-class women by appealing to their roles as mothers. Both offering new access to the public while reinforcing traditional gender norms, theaters framed female spectators’ womanhood in relation to family. The presence of white mothers distinguished auditoriums from other public spaces linked with Blackness. Inside theaters, mothers and their children joined a culturally and mostly racially homogenous assembly that was distinct from the streets’ crowds. Examining advertising, programming, reviews, and legal and business codes, this talk centers the theater and its crafting of new urban identities.
 
Sponsored by Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, Lectures and Concerts Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, with additional funding from History, LACLaS and Theater and Dance.
 
FMI contact Jay Sosa.