Donna M. Goldstein Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown.

Roth-Gordon, Jennifer

Donna M. Goldstein Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, xxiii + 349 pp.

Set in a Brazilian favela (shantytown), the social and geographic location that one out of every ten Rio residents calls home, Laughter Out of Place offers readers a well-written ethnography documenting the darker side of daily life. Goldstein focuses on the struggles of women, paying special attention to questions of gender and sexuality. In doing so, she also illustrates the ways previous studies on race and class in Brazil have not always treated the realities of poor women of colour with sufficient nuance. In telling the tales of Gloria, a dark-skinned domestic worker, she explores the way large structural inequalities permeate the daily lives of Brazil's most underprivileged citizens. Following this main protagonist, readers are exposed to the harsh realities of hunger, impoverishment, rape, child abandonment, domestic abuse, police violence, gang warfare, and murder. To her credit, Goldstein's analysis neither ignores nor overemphasizes the agency of Gloria and her family in negotiating life under tremendous economic, physical, and psychological stress.

Directing scholarly attention to the private, "protected" world of the home, Goldstein interrogates the ways race, class, and gender hierarchies are both consciously and unconsciously perpetuated. She accompanies Gloria to her day job as a faxineira (heavy-duty day cleaner) and uses this context to explore the complicated worker-patron relationship that serves as a microcosm of inequality in Brazil. Gloria's employers, members of the middle class, are reliant on poor, generally dark-skinned women for even the most basic of household services. Yet, as Goldstein points out, this helplessness is an important marker of status, as master-slave relationships are transformed into more modern forms of servitude. Turning to examine Gloria's own home, Goldstein describes the difficulties of raising children in an environment inundated with drugs, gang warfare, and teenage pregnancy. Here the author is more ambivalent about the decisions her friend/ informant must make to uphold her responsibilities to a large and demanding extended family.

In investigating the intricate connections between private lives and public discourses, Goldstein delves into the interracial fantasies and real-life relationships that hinge on the exotification of the Brazilian mulata. She suggests that relationships between poor black women and wealthier, whiter men help support the myth of Brazil as a "color-blind erotic democracy." Here dark-skinned women take pleasure in and gain financial support from the white gaze, participating in interracial relationships which reveal perhaps the prototypical form of Brazilian racism: adherence to a strict colour hierarchy but not a strict (North American) colour line. As the author demonstrates, Gloria and her female friends engage local racial ideologies, simultaneously upholding them, even as they try to work them to their own personal advantage. Goldstein ends this section with a convincing call to study race and sexuality together, carefully interrogating the picture postcards that tout Brazilian racial equality. As she astutely observes, "[t]he idea that Brazil is a color-blind erotic democracy--that the power associated with gender, race, and class plays no role in sexual partnerships--helps to mask and normalize everyday racism and internalized racism in Brazil" (p. 135).

Goldstein's account is loosely organized around the theme of black or dark humour, and she begins each chapter with an example of how favela residents choose to laugh--"out of place" as it were (as the book's title indicates)--at the "absurdity of the world they inhabit" (p. 13). Jokes about the corpses of family members, racism, and child abuse link comedy with suffering and tragedy, masking a "certain loss of innocence" and revealing a "profound form of truth" (p. 3). Like many researchers before her, the author finds that these women are disconnected from more traditional forms of political organization, yet she suggests that their jokes stand in place of more bold and obvious examples of protest. "In my own experiences in Brazil," she reflects, "laughter seems to fall short of a direct weapon of rebellion; humor is a much more discursive form of resistance" (p. 16). She finds that humour opens a space from which to speak about topics that are otherwise naturalized or silenced in Brazilian society. From experiences of criminalization by the police and dominant society, to social and geographic marginalization from city spaces, to aesthetic degradation based on the colour of their skin, hair texture, and facial features, the difficulty of daily life for favela dwellers finds expression in dark humour.

In one of the most compelling chapters, "State Terror, Gangs, and Everyday Violence in Rio de Janeiro," Goldstein addresses the complicated relationship between favela residents, drug trafficking, and the state. In an all-too-common scenario, local drug-trafficking gangs provide jobs and an alternative justice system--a parallel state--to poor communities, winning the fear and respect of local residents. Putting a human face on shocking human rights statistics, the author describes the violence that pervades the lives of her informants. Revenge practices, by both police and bandidos (bandits), offer one explanation for the high death rate of young males in these neighbourhoods. Tales of rape, murder, domestic violence, child abuse, and constant fear make palpable Brazil's crisis of law and order. The pervasiveness of this violence, the desire for justice through more effective, local channels, and the overall sense of insecurity jump out of the pages of this book.

What Goldstein makes clear in this readily accessible ethnography is that laughter is not always an indication of sincere pleasure. While Brazil may present a "tropical paradise" to tourists and the whiter, wealthier classes, Laughter out of Place demonstrates that poverty and marginalization are not mitigated by climate. It is through their laughter that favela women reveal not an essentialized spirit of happiness and optimism, but a dark sense of desperation, offering us an uncomfortable glimpse into the experience of Brazilian inequality.

Jennifer Roth-Gordon, University of Arizona