While this figure is seen as highly desirable across the globe today, the BBL procedure and its association with its namesake in Brazil has a long history rooted in anti-Blackness. In fact, we can trace the obsession with the BBL and the body it promotes at least since the abolition of slavery in Latin America’s largest country. Brazil is also home to the largest population of people of African descent outside of the African continent.
After the abolition of slavery in 1888, white Brazilian elites, most of whom were descendants of Portuguese colonists, had a conundrum. They dreamed of building a White nation, shaped by a concept of progress understood as directly related to whiteness. But Brazil’s population of African descent far outnumbered its white population.
White elites latched onto the growing eugenics movement, which was emerging around the globe, as a possible solution. Eugenics aimed to “improve” the population according to White’s elitist standards. In Brazil, eugenic policies included the imprisonment and sterilization of certain groups and other measures.
White Brazilian elites hoped that eugenics would help them achieve some form of what they saw as racial progress, making black Brazilians more like white Brazilians, physiologically and culturally.
Prominent eugenicist Renato Kehl argued that plastic surgery was “the cure for ugliness.” He focused mainly on the female body, especially the sagging breasts, wrinkles and especially what he and other surgeons to this day called the “negroid nose”. His vision of improving women’s bodies involved reshaping them to fit an elitist White vision of beauty. This thinking helped create a plastic surgery industry in Brazil that was anti-Blackness at its core.
There were similar pseudoscientific debates surrounding miscegenation or interracial reproduction. During the height of the eugenics movement in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, eugenicists such as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues viewed interracial reproduction as undesirable because they believed it corrupted whiteness. Others, however, thought it could serve as a way to “dilute” blackness over the generations—and with it, what whites saw as undesirable traits. Kehl and others again saw a role for plastic surgery in trying to clean up these features. Surgery can fix the aesthetic “problems” of centuries of complication by reconstructing bodies to conform to White standards of beauty.
During the first half of the 20th century, many intellectuals and politicians came not only to support misgeneration, but to celebrate it. This holiday effectively became a propaganda tool to erase racial consciousness and push the diverse people of Brazil to see themselves as “Brazilian”. Different political regimes used this populist rhetoric for their strategic needs, as was the case with the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45), which made Carnival a national holiday to celebrate the multiracial formation of the country. These politicians proclaimed the mixing of races as integral to the formation of an exceptional Brazilian post-racial society.
The epitome of this celebration of racial mixing was a new national symbol for Brazilians to embrace: a hyper-sexualized mixed-race black woman known as Kitchen Table. The mixed-race woman, or her white fantasy, became both the embodiment of the new national myth and the sexual and reproductive mechanism for the mixing of races that would whiten the population by reducing or diluting the black population.
Media and popular culture during the 1960s and 1970s featured Kitchen Table as a light-skinned black woman who possesses the body type that is marketed as desirable worldwide today: an hourglass figure with a slim waist, wide hips, and protruding buttocks. This image was popularized abroad in the 1970s and 1980s through films such as Gabriela (1983) and even by the Brazilian tourism board, Embratur, including a nearly hour-long promotional film entitled “Carnival in Rio” (1983). That film found actor Arnold Schwarzenegger traveling to Brazil “to learn about the triple threat of Carnival: ” in this (posterior), to Kitchen Table and Samba.” Intellectuals, writers, and others declared Brazilian women’s rears a “national passion” or “national preference” in terms of sexual desire and desirable body type.
This body type is ubiquitous today in the sexualization of women’s bodies in Brazil, with entire beauty pageants dedicated to the rear. This is the case of the annual Miss Bumbum pageant, in which 27 women representing each Brazilian state compete against each other for the title of the best butt in Brazil. Generally, they all have the same hourglass figure and are white or fair-skinned.
The popularization of this racialized image pushed women towards plastic surgery. On major Brazilian television and magazines, including many dedicated to plastic surgery, surgeons rejoice in its success – not unlike eugenicists decades ago. One noted that “the back of the Brazilian woman is, without a doubt, the most successful in the world …[due to] that wonderful mixture of races.”
This nationalist rhetoric crystallized in the form of buttocks becoming a marketing tool for surgeons in Brazil and around the world, giving aesthetic credibility to the surgeon and the results. Brazilian surgeon Ivo Pitanguy is credited with pioneering the procedure and the first to teach it to other surgeons at the training center he founded in 1960. At that point, “Brazilian” became the operative adjective in the name of the procedure.
The popularity of BBL and the body type it promises reached US and global popular cultures in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the sexualization of megastars of color like Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez, as well as those who appropriated that image in their stardom building, like Kim Kardashian.
Their stardom made this particular body type a product to be achieved and consumed. Many non-Black women turn to the procedure in their “black fishing,” or their broader efforts to appropriate Blackness or pass, even temporarily, as Black, often for financial gain. on social media. In the era of social media branding, individual users use these cosmetic standards and procedures to monetize large followings, also known as influencer following.
As such, demand for the procedure is extremely high. With surgeons overwhelmed by demand in doctors’ offices and other medical settings, there has been an increase in procedures performed by unlicensed “doctors” and others, including cases where patients have been injected with unsafe and toxic materials, such as such as cement and sealing.
Today, as in the past, it is black women suffering the consequences of the culture surrounding BBL and its anti-Black history. Racial, gender, and economic marginalization groups make black women more vulnerable to unlicensed treatment or surgery, for example. While non-Black women often reap the benefits of the body type promised by BBL, Black women can be socially and economically penalized for it in a world that condemns Blackness and demands that Black women maintain “respectable” appearances, which often stands in White, middle-class presentation.
The high demand for the Brazilian butt lift—and those who seek to take advantage of that demand, even if they are not qualified to provide it—have made it one of the riskiest procedures. The history of BBL reveals striking similarities in White fantasies of control and consumption of Black women’s bodies, both then and today.
