Um corpo que fala: os significados do corpo negro em Zélia Amador de Deus, Lélia Gonzalez e Sueli Carneiro

Abstract

This is a descriptive research, with a bibliographical methodology, of an exploratory and qualitative nature, which investigates the meanings of the black body present in the selected works of the authors Zélia Amador de Deus, Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli Carneiro, examining the critical discussion made about race, corporeality, the black body, social and racial hierarchization of Brazilian society. The objective is to evaluate how cultural, sociological, historical, political, legislative and power organization processes interfere and are reflected in the way in which the legal system interprets the racial issue in Brazil to, in the end, present a theoretical-conceptual framework of the Brazilian racial issue that can assist the field of Law and its agents in substantiating theses in cases of confronting contemporary racism and racial discrimination. The hypothesis of this research is that the fragmentation established against the black subject through his body and his racialized identity would be one of the strong reasons that underpin the perpetuation of domination, subordination and racial hierarchy against black people in Brazil, generating inequalities. This historically constructed division structures the apprehension of reality, the organization of power and hierarchical relations in Brazil, dividing the black body into two meanings, one under interdiction and the other under creative resistance. The subalternities produced are due to the forms of interdiction suffered by the black body that generate naturalized inequality and take away rights due to racism and racial discrimination. The resistances and creative struggles, waged in the face of oppressive power, enable the Afro-Brazilian people to give new meaning to blackness in a collective racial and cultural identity for the purposes of political and cultural mobilization for the implementation of equity, justice and racial democracy. It is concluded that this hypothesis is confirmed when verifying the denial of the relevance of race for the exercise of rights, in the way in which racial relations are apprehended from a racially exclusionary epistemological stance in the interpretation and performance of jurists in the face of racial issues, especially regarding the principle of equality, generally read in its formal legalistic dimension, ignoring the fact that socioeconomic, cultural and historical conditions impact the achievement of material equality between racially hierarchical social groups in different status positions, a fact already attested in demographic surveys carried out by official institutes (Carneiro, 2023, p. 53).