Xuxa (SHOO-sha), a former Playboy model and soft-porn movie actress, is Brazil's mass media megastar whose children's television show reaches millions of people in Latin America and the United States. Amelia Simpson explores how the blond sex symbol emerged in the 1980s to become a cultural icon of extraordinary authority throughout the Americas. Although Xuxa's show is aimed at younger audiences, the images she projects inform television viewers of all ages about what constitutes happiness, beauty, and success. Simpson's colorful analysis argues that 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.Backed by Brazil's powerful TV Globo, the fourth largest commercial network in the world, Xuxa has built an empire by relentlessly marketing images that affirm the status quo of gender and race in Brazil. The phenomenal response to the star reflects the complicity of mass audiences eager to celebrate her deeply compromised representations of gender, race, and modernity. In exploring the meaning behind the myth that is Xuxa, the author examines the ingredients of her stardom, including her long-term relationship with Brazil's soccer idol, Pele, and the careful manufacture of a sexually suggestive style juxtaposed with juvenile entertainment. The book discusses the numerous Xuxa clones who reinforce her messages, and the 1991 kidnapping episode that exposed some of the contradictions the star's image embodies and accelerated her pursuit of television opportunities in the United States.Simpson's book is the first to examine the virtually unchallenged figure of Xuxa, whose story unfolds in the symbolic territory of blond sex symbols worldwide.