I loved this book and could not put it down. While academic in tone, it is also conversational and interesting to read for any audience. Moreiras book is an astute look at intersectional feminine performances in the contexts of Brazil and Funkeiras. Her interviews demonstrate the power of qualitative methodologies to uproot long-held assumptions that femininity is anything other than strength and resilience. This text offers scholars of communication studies, femininity studies, and/or women, gender, and sexuality studies a brilliant take on a specific community, with lessons of feminine empowerment for us all.Kathryn Hobson, Assistant Professor, School of Communication Studies, James Madison University Bitches Unleashed: Performance and Embodied Politics in Favela Funk represents truly cutting-edge, outstanding and groundbreaking scholarship in Critical Intercultural Communication Studies. Raquel Moreira demonstrates an intersectional, performative approach to study historically nuanced and culturally specific modes of gender, sexuality, and the body among Brazils favela funk performers who are mostly Black and brown singers in the age of globalization. The most significant aspect of this book is to unapologetically showcase the paradox of desire in performing hypersexualized feminine genders which are often controlled, disciplined, and surveilled by patriarchy, sexism, and heteronormativity.Shinsuke Eguchi, Associate Professor, Department of Communication & Journalism, University of New Mexico Centering the voices and performances of funkeirasBlack and Brown favela performersto examine embodied gender politics in Brazil, Bitches Unleashed: Performance and Embodied Politics in Favela Funk offers fresh and insightful ways to engage with racialized performances of femininity from the perspective of the Global South. Theoretically rich and methodologically sensitive, Moreira decenters white, Western epistemological frameworks to provide an important contribution to Communication, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies. This is a timely and significant book!Gust A. Yep, Professor, Communication Studies Department, Graduate Faculty, Sexuality Studies Program, Faculty, Ed.D. Program in Educational Leadership, San Francisco State University We want the (favela) funk! Gotta have that (favela) funk! Moreira, in Bitches Unleashed, dismantles Global North and White, U.S. centric perspectives of research by reconceptualizing systems of gender and sexuality through transfeminista formulations of agency. By focusing on structural change and decolonizing cisheteronormativity, the centering of people of color and travesti communication offers the reader powerful analyses of white feminist failures, coloniality, transgression, intersectionality, and critical qualitative methodologies.Robert Gutierrez-Perez, Assistant Professor, Editor, Border-Lines: Journal of the Latino Research Center, Department of Communication Studies, University of Nevada, Reno
