Mila entered a few local shops in a rural town in Galicia, Spain, desperately asking for help. She fled each time someone called the police. Hours later, her body was found in a garbage container.
A few days went by, and the news vanished. She was referred to merely as “a woman of Brazilian nationality.” Her name only came to light thanks to the efforts of a feminist collective in Pontevedra. Mila: brown skin, long black hair, humble origins. Married to the son of the brothel owner where she had once worked as a domestic worker, no longer involved in sex work. Her story was closed with vague terms like “depression” and “out of control.” Despite the signs of violence, the possibility of homicide was dismissed.
But Mila is not an exception. She is a mirror. She reflects centuries of a colonial history that turned the bodies of Brazilian women — especially non-white women — into objects of consumption. And like any commodity, her value lies not in her voice, but in her image.
Since the earliest European encounters in Brazil, the female body has been a site of exploitation. Indigenous women were offered, Black women were enslaved, and mixed-race women were celebrated as symbols of tropical seduction. Art, literature, and pop culture helped shape and export this figure: the exotic Brazilian woman, sensual, always available, never complex.
From Eckhout’s paintings to Gabriela, from Iracema to Tieta, these characters are sexualized in narratives that — even when wrapped in discourses of “female empowerment” — ultimately serve the same consumer gaze. They are stories where erotic freedom often masks patriarchal control.
This is not just a foreign invention. In Brazil, the media plays a crucial role in reinforcing these very images. Girls grow up watching hypersexualized characters, listening to songs with explicit lyrics, and seeing as role models women who gain fame more for the exposure of their bodies than for the expression of their thoughts.
For many women from poor or marginalized backgrounds, this becomes the only visible path to recognition. A path paved by the very stereotype — now adopted in the struggle for survival, autonomy, or even the dream of success abroad.
Carnival. Funk. TV exports. Brazil has long sold the image foreigners want to buy. The foreign gaze rarely cares about the woman as a subject, thinker, or creator — only about the pleasure she can offer.
Even artistic productions that try to critique this objectification — like Santarosa Barreto’s pink neon installation featuring the phrase “Are you Brazilian? Oh, I love Brazilian women” (exhibited at MASP in 2019) — struggle to cross the class and national boundaries necessary to reach the very audiences that perpetuate the problem.
As long as Brazilian culture continues to export this edited, sexualized figure — and as long as we continue to consume it with pride — the stereotype will stay alive.
Deconstructing the current image of the Brazilian woman abroad requires time, collective effort, and coordination across social classes. We are dealing with one of the country’s oldest “exports”: the exotic female body. A profitable, seductive myth.
Within Brazil, this image becomes a harmful model for thousands of women — especially those without access to education but deeply influenced by mass media.
Many artistic works speak of empowerment, but what reaches the global stage rarely challenges the colonial erotic fantasy. On the contrary, it often sustains it — neatly packaged, easily consumed.
Mila was not only a victim of gender-based violence.
She was a victim of a narrative that still finds value in selling a fantasy.
Until that story changes, we will keep writing endings like hers
