Pride for the black body expressed in the clothing worn by anti-racist brazilian black women

Abstract

Using ethnographic data from the Facebook profiles of anti-racist black Brazilian women who are in favor of the valorization of blackness, and with the help of conceptual frameworks based on semiotics, this article demonstrates that the study participants construct a narrative in which racism and Eurocentrism provoke in black women a feeling of shame for the diacritical features of the black “race,” resulting in rejection, abandonment, and concealment of such features in order to avoid prejudice and discrimination. However, these women seek a new narrative by showing that in the past before colonization, black people were powerful and free, they could manipulate their bodies according to their own models of beauty, without having to submit to the white and European body standard. This idealization of the black subject and of Africa in the pre-colonization past begins to provoke pride in black women in relation to the diacritical features of the black “race.” This pride in the black body is manifested in the clothing of these women, who begin to adopt, maintain and display the features of the black body represented in clothes and accessories, namely: earrings with reference to the black body; flowers in curly and frizzy hair; and drawings of black bodies printed on clothes. With those clothes, they provoke the construction of a positive image of themselves in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, and the receipt of compliments and other positive reactions.