Modern, skilled, entrepreneurs: Is there a “new” discourse about Brazilian women in the Portuguese media?

Abstract

In the last three decades (since the 1990s), Brazilian immigration to Portugal has been studied intensively from both the Brazilian and the Portuguese perspective (Finotelli et al. 2013; Malheiros 2007; Padilla et al. 2015). It was mainly the work of Brazilian anthropologists FeldmanBianco (1997) and Machado (1999) that opened up this research field in the 1990s.The first decade of the 2000s witnessed a notable transformation of the composition of the flows of migrants and of the Brazilian community in the country. This shift coincided with a new reality: the growing number of women, aligning with what is commonly referred to in the literature as the feminization of migration (Padilla 2007a). Hence, during this time, special attention was paid to addressing the stereotypes, hypersexualization, and stigmatization dynamics surrounding these women, which was having a strong impact on their integration into local society (Gomes 2013; Pontes 2004). Thus, since then, the Portuguese media has played an important role in reproducing and highlighting discourses that portrayed them as exotic, sensual, submissive, inferior, and sexually available.