“What About Gender Equality in the Jungle?”

Tropes of the Unknown, Swedish Gender Exceptionalism and Indigenous Rexistence in Brazil

Resumé

This article examines tropes of the unknown and Swedish gender exceptionalism using a series of photographs taken in the Brazilian state of Acre in 2008. Upon publication, the photos sparked sensation worldwide for supposedly depicting a community ‘untouched’ by the outside world. In Sweden, they came to be particularly understood within a discourse of gender equality. Drawing on, among others, Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘strangerness’, Alcida Ramos’ ‘hyperreal Indian’, and studies of gender exceptionalism in Sweden, the article places the photos and their reception in a wider context of colonial violence, complicity and denial of coevalness. In an effort to widen the perspective on the continuing life of non-colonized communities, the article further argues that even while justified and necessary, critique of colonial tropes of the unknown risks reproducing a conflation of the modern with the present that keeps foreclosing the possibilities of other worlds. Instead, in a final reflection, the article turns to the mobilisation of Indigenous women in Brazil and the articulation of a politics of rexistência.