Abstract
Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil seeks to illuminate the confluence of factors that enable rural, working-class Afro-Brazilian women to end their marriages, and the implications these dissolutions have for their well-being and their kinship relationships. Based on years of ethnographic research in Brogodó, situated in the state of Bahia in northeast Brazil, Melanie A. Medeiros draws from in-depth interviews and focus groups with women as well as participant observations. Medeiros explains how changing ideas about gender and marriage—specifically the rise of a marriage based on romantic love and fidelity—are the key drivers behind women’s decisions to end their marriages.
The book is organized into seven chapters. The first two chapters provide a background on Brogodó, the study participants, as well as changing norms around gender, marriage, and work in the Brazilian context. Chapters three to six comprise the main empirical analysis. In chapter three, Medeiros zooms in on telenovelas, which she attributes as being critical for disseminating ideas of romantic love as defined by fidelity. While the virtual reality of telenovelas is a far cry from the material reality of the lives of these women, it is a powerful force in shaping ideas about companionate marriages. Chapter four focuses on how marriages, for women, have shifted from a basis of the older ideal of boa covivência (good existence) to newer expectations of respect and fidelity. While boa covivência meant a lack of arguments or domestic abuse, it did not necessarily mean fidelity. When the expectation of fidelity is thwarted, the younger women that Medeiros studies consider ending their marriages as a self-respecting act, in a sharp departure from how women a generation earlier would have responded. Chapter five examines the issue of nervos, or “the physical manifestation of the psychosocial experience of distress and suffering” (108), as a way of legitimating women’s decisions to end their marriages. Finally, chapter six explains how the decision to end marriages is often possible because of the strong kinship support women have. Medeiros concludes with a call to develop an anthropology of divorce.
A key contribution of this study is its delineation of the shift in norms around marriage, fidelity, and divorce in Brogodó. Financially independent, and often fatigued at having experienced infidelity with partners before, younger women in Medeiros’s study have a zero-tolerance policy for infidelity from their partners, seeing infidelity as intolerably disrespectful. Several of the women in the study preferred husbands who were unable to support their families over husbands who provided well but cheated. In contrast, older women explained that as long boa covivência exists, there is no need to leave your husband because of his infidelity.
A second contribution of the study is how Medeiros deftly links social suffering to physical suffering. Women experience headaches, insomnia, and stress as they reconcile with the end of relationships and lives together, which often had been profoundly meaningful to them. Their depth of suffering, written onto their bodies, becomes a means of asserting that the disrespect they experienced through their husbands’ infidelity had emotional and physical impacts.
Medeiros provides a compelling insight into shifting norms around marriage and divorce in rural Northeast Brazil. Yet, at times the book would have benefited from other sources to further illuminate the lives of the women in this study. I found myself repeatedly wondering that if all the women claimed sexual fidelity for themselves but if many of their husbands were out in the rua with other women, who were these other women? Were they also married? While men’s infidelity is paramount in this study, women’s infidelity is noticeably absent. Examples of women’s infidelity would have helped a fuller development of Medeiros’s arguments about shifting norms in marital expectations as vested in fidelity.
A second point here is that infidelity is not simply a biological urge, as the few excerpts from men in this study explain. In this context, infidelity is deeply tied to hegemonic conceptions of masculinity. More data from men to build upon this would also have been fruitful. This is especially the case because we see that from women’s perspectives norms around marriage are shifting; but from the men’s perspective they do not appear to be changing. Understanding this lopsided shift in marital norms and behaviors would help provide a more holistic understanding of how, and for whom, conceptions of gender and marriage are evolving and why.
Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil is a useful book on how race, class, region, and gender combine to shape women’s expectations around marriage. The empirical analysis it provides will be especially useful to scholars of gender, race, and family. This book could be taught in a graduate course on these issues. Excerpts from it may also be appropriate for undergraduate classes on gender and race.