“Die schwarze Venus aus Rio de Janeiro”: notes on race, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality in an artistic career between Brazil and Germany*

Abstract

This article analyses fragments of the life and artistic trajectory of Mylena de Souza (1945-date
unknown), a black and transgender artist who starred in magazines and nightclubs in Rio de
Janeiro in the second half of the 1960s. Escaping the violent persecution of people dissenting
from the cis-hetero-norm by Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964-1985), Mylena emigrated
to the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1970s. After settling in West Berlin, Mylena
joined the cast of the prestigious cabaret Chez Nous (1958-2008), where she worked as a
singer, dancer, and stripteuse until her demise in the second half of the 1980s. Drawing on
Brazilian and German documentary sources and in-depth interviews, I observe how Mylena
navigated amidst different regimes of eroticism and exoticism that intersect sexuality, gender,
race and nationality in Brazil and West Germany. Furthermore, I argue that her life and artistic
career were permeated by multiple processes of belonging and sexoticization that inform us
about the conditions of existence and the possibilities for migration of people dissenting from
the cis-hetero-norm in Brazil and West Germany.