Sex Must Speak: Confession, Power and Intermediality in Arnaldo Jabor’s Cinema

In Arnaldo Jabor’s Toda Nudez Será Castigada (1973) and O Casamento (1975), characters speak about sex to lovers, relatives, doctors and priests. They seek love, forgiveness or revenge, yet their revelations rarely settle the conflicts that prompt them. Adapted from a play and a novel by Nelson Rodrigues, these films turn family life into a disturbing encounter between sexual desire and moral conviction.

This lecture explores how Jabor gives these conflicts cinematic form against the backdrop of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s discussion of confession, it asks who is entitled to judge sexual experience and what happens when those claiming moral authority become implicated in the desires they condemn. It also examines how Jabor reworks Rodrigues’s writing through performance, framing, editing and sound, bringing the tensions between speech and bodily expression to the screen.

The argument centers on the uneasy relationship between desire and respectability. Through melodrama, irony and moments of bodily excess, Jabor makes that relationship both moving and uncomfortable. His characters may expose hypocrisy or defy sexual conventions without escaping the values that govern their lives. Their intimate conflicts reveal how power persists within the family—and within the very desires that appear to challenge it.

Presented by Dr. Ting Huang - Chinese Communications University, Department of European Languages, School of International Studies, Beijing, China
Currently Visiting Researcher, University of Leeds, UK