Xuxa: Children's Music From Brazil

Xuxa, aka Maria das Gracas Meneghel, has been a popular host of children's television shows in Brazil since the early 1980s, starting with the Xou da Xuxa program on TV Globo. Xuxa is also a singer who has has released many bestselling albums of Brazilian children's music.

Books About Xuxa

Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing Of
Gender, Race, And Modernity (hardcover)
by Amelia Simpson

Former Playboy centerfold and soft-porn movie actress Xuxa (SHOO-sha) emerged in the 1980s as Brazil's mass media megastar. Through her children's television show, which reaches millions of people in Latin America and the United States, this blond sex symbol has attained extraordinary cultural authority. Reaching far beyond younger audiences, Xuxa's show informs the culture at large about gender relations, racial democracy, and idealized beauty. Backed by Brazil's TV Globo, the fourth-largest commercial network in the world, Xuxa has built an empire. Amelia Simoson's colorful portrayal is the first book to explore how Xuxa's representation of femininity, her privileging of a white ideal of beauty, and her promotional approach to culture perpetuate inequality on an unprecedented scale. Simpson's thoughtful analysis exposes the complicity of a mass audience eager to celebrate Xuxa's deeply compromised representations of gender, race, and modernity. --book description

Brazilian Music Index