“I sang, how cruel it is to sing like this”: gender issues at the song festivals (1965-1972)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze gender relations and media on the Festivals of Song realized in Brazilian television between the years 1965 and 1972 in several televised channels. The main focus will be given to International Festivals Rede Globo, though the analysis also reaches festivals of others channels. The Festival of Song, or the Festivals, have special significance because they occurred in a short space of time, but nevertheless, are a component in an important phase in Brazilian history, the period of the military dictatorship. They also have in their time characteristic the fact to have permeated the changes caused by Institutional Act No. 5 (IA - 5) that formalized the military regime as a sensor and coercive government, in anther words, a dictatorship. The television festivals emerge as a space in which power relations occurred nonlinearly related to the female and the traditional role that a socio-historical representation imposes for women: associated with sentimental sphere and home space. These both with regard to the power relationship between the artists and the political relationship with the military. On the one hand, this space reflects the majority male presence in various sectors of the television and music industry, with an overwhelming number of men in the presentation and even mostly in musical composition. On the other hand, demonstrates the current social contradictions: the rise of the feminist movement, extolling the symbolic action of female participation, usually favorite to bring his songs, written generally by men, to the top awardsin these festivals, and in a context of repression they suffered specifics military sensors that were ever vigilant of the “dangers” posed by female sexual liberation, according to “moral values“ of these time.