Holy Harlots: Femininity, Sexuality, and Black Magic in Brazil

Kelly E. Hayes is a scholar of religion, and this academic book, published by University of California Press, is an ethnographic and historical study of the Pomba Gira spirits in Brazilian Umbanda and Quimbanda, examining how these transgressive female spirit figures are understood and embodied by practitioners despite being widely stigmatized as dangerous or immoral within Brazilian society. Its strength is that Hayes takes practitioners' own understanding of these spirits seriously as religious meaning rather than treating the surrounding stigma as the last word, combining historical research with direct ethnographic fieldwork. Its limit is that it focuses on the specific Brazilian Afro-diasporic traditions and communities Hayes studied, not the full range of Afro-Brazilian religion, so claims about other traditions such as Candomble need a separate dedicated source.