Discurso, ideologia e racismo: sentidos conflitantes do/ sobre o empoderamento da estética da mulher negra.

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to understand the competing meanings within the discourse of/about the empowerment of black women's aesthetics that run in society. To achieve this, we applied the Discourse Analysis as an analytical-theoretical tool of interpretation as Pêcheux (1990, 2009, 2011) and Orlandi (1990, 1996, 2015, 2016, 2018) prompted since it is an intersection between Linguistics, Materialism History, and Psychoanalysis. That allowed us to reason over language, discourse, political aspects, and the historicity of the object, which is essential to increment the topic. In addition of these Discourse Analysis specialists, we strengthened the dialogue with Marx (2005, 2013), for we understand that racism is intrinsic to the capitalist social construction and, therefore, directly related to class struggle. Moreover, our topic is related to the concept of commodity Marx crafted. We also profited from authors who debate gender and race with a Marxist approach, such as Almeida (2019), Gomes (2002, 2015, 2017, 2018), among others, that were key to develop a debate articulating the dialogue between gender, race, and class according to the discursive approach. The corpus contains images an texts printed on bottles of products for curly hair and run on digital media (such as websites, Instagram, and YouTube), sales and advertising areas, and the analysis of eighteen responses from a questionnaire disseminated in YouTube communities targeting black women. We confirmed the hypothesis of this work when we recognized that cosmetic companies encourage women to embrace natural hair (without chemical straightening or heat sources, such as straightening brushes and/or irons) through specific products for curly texture while appropriating and emboldening the empowerment of black aesthetics. They nonetheless end up reproducing a racist discourse through the idea of a new beauty standard: that of “perfect”, “aligned”, and “hydrated” curls. We finally concluded that there is an attempt to silence black aesthetics besides inciting the exacerbated consumption of industrialized products at the expense of exploiting the image of black women.