Scielo RSS http://socialsciences.scielo.org/rss.php?pid=0104-833320080001&lang=es vol. 1 num. SE lang. es http://socialsciences.scielo.org/img/en/fbpelogp.gif http://socialsciences.scielo.org http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332008000100001&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es The present article inquires into the ways in which a presumed Brazilian "managing" of sexual categories or identities (mainly related to male homosexuality) has been conceived of in anthropology since the end of the 1970, sometimes becoming an axis for building and maintaining a national identity characterized as exotic, backward and non-Western. We also trace parallels between two historical moments of reflection regarding the links between sexuality, culture and politics, briefly reviewing some of the early theoretical and empirical contributions that prefigure the central concerns and conceptualizations of today's sexuality studies: the instability and fluidity of sexual identities and the entanglement of sexuality with dynamic and contextual power relationships and social hierarchies. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332008000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es The Freud-Fliess letters attracted attention to Freud's nanny and also to the role played by nannies in the ideal family of psychoanalytic theory. Included in the models that explained the bourgeois family since the nineteenth century, but excluded by analytic theory, the nanny, ever present in Brazilian upper-class families, still poses a question to the father-mother-infant triangle. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332008000100003&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es Alternative conflict resolution based on conciliation have been identified as a possible response to problems of access to courts deriving from the numbers, costs and length of proceedings in the Brazilian's judicial system. This paper focuses on these alternative forms of justice, regarding domestic violence. Using ethnographic studies of Women's Police Stations and at Small Claim Courts, we argue that conciliation can be very different in these two institutions of the judicial system. The contrasts between moral values and the symbols used in different forms by these two institutions offer elements that can further be our understanding of the context in which Maria da Penha Law was created on August 17th of 2006. With the promulgation of this law, cases of domestic violence against women were excluded from Small Claim Courts in Brazil. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332008000100004&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es In the present article, I comment on some difficulties related to the building of knowledge regarding human trafficking. I base the present work on research carried out in Brazil and in Spain which shows the importance of mapping and politically locating the different interest groups involved, including those people whom believe that they are protecting and helping trafficking victims. I analyze methodological problems, discussing the effects of the validity of different definitions of human trafficking in the production of data and documents. In conclusion, I consider the distinctions between crime and the violation of human rights so as to better reflect on one of the aspects present in the material: the distance between the perception of those technically considered to be victims of trafficking and the legal definitions of this crime. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332008000100005&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es The dream of traveling between Brazil and Europe is easy to find in the referential bibliography about transvestites. The changes related to the trafficking in persons, in the Brazilian penal code in 2005, show how different interpretations of the terminology "facilitate" and "facilitation" made a strong impact on transvestites' lives, criminalizing some practices of this group that had in fact been part of their sociability. I argue that the unrecognized position of prostitution as legal work creates a substantial gap between the transvestites and the other illegal Brazilian workers, which leads them into potentially vulnerable situations. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332008000100006&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es Drawing from a broader research on gender inflections in the Brazilian intellectual field and in Brazilian drama, between 1940 and 1968, the article discusses the relations between aesthetics and gender, and their implications on the careers of actresses Cacilda Becker, Maria Della Costa, Tônia Carrero and Cleyde Yáconis. According to testimony of those who saw her perform on stage, Cacilda was never hampered by her less favorable physical attributes. The hypothesis is that this is due to the cunning tricks of the conventions of dramatic arts that allow the dodging of social, gender and physical constraints. Widely evoked by the media to portrait, underline or diminish women under its focus, beauty rarely features as a relevant dimension in the analysis of female trajectories. Hence the interest in discussing the subject through its refraction on the process of social construction of artistic careers.