Spaces of Secrets, Sex, and Subversion: How Motels Embody Brazilian Society

Brazil is a country rife with contradictions and paradoxes, which are perplexing but also logical within its larger social and cultural context. This senior essay explores these enigmas through an analysis of motels in Brazil, which are spaces of sex available for short-term rent. By making sense of the motels' affect and relationship to households, the country's religious setting, and tendency towards subversion, the essay develops a complex, yet thorough, way to comprehend the blatant incongruities of Brazilian culture. Identifying the relationship between public and private, society and desire, sexuality and purity, the senior essay relates larger cultural concepts along with theories of postmodernism and orientalism supplemented by field research and interviews in the pursuit of a objective and intimate study.