Solar Seduction: Aesthetic Labor and Racial Discipline in Brazil's Newest Tanning Craze

Fita tanning entails the application of thin strips of electrical tape to create an individualized bikini that will give women “a marquinha perfeita” (perfect little tan lines)—lines that are sharp, straight, and delightfully symmetrical. In Brazil, a country hyperfocused on color and racial mixture, tanning shows how low-income non-white women layer racial ideologies onto their bodies and into their aesthetic practices. We argue that tanners in Rio de Janeiro shake up ideas that racial identity can be linked to skin color and locatable on the body's surface. They also play with a national reputation, most famously/notoriously theorized by Gilberto Freyre, that to be Brazilian is to embody race mixture and brownness. Tanners reject an extreme or racially “pure” whiteness, but they also lean into racial beliefs about hypersexualized non-white bodies. Finally, tanners engage with very old ideas about race and climate that suggest fundamental differences between the civilized industriousness associated with whiteness and the supposed sloth and lascivious nature of those who live in the tropics. Through the meticulous care, bodily alteration, and self-improvement prominently displayed on their skin, non-white Brazilian tanners stake their own claims to racial respectability and discipline.