Panmela Castro's Political Street Art: Gendered Geographies of Black Brazilian Resistance

Abstract

Panmela Castro's Political Street Art:Gendered Geographies of Black Brazilian Resistance Aarti Madan (bio) As global feminist activism has reached unprecedented heights in the new millennium, Latin America has seeded numerous streetbased social (media) movements that have propagated to cities across the world. Argentina's #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess), Chile's Las Tesis (Theses), and Brazil's #PrimeiroAssedio (#FirstHarassment), for example, exemplify new wave feminist political action that melds oral protest and performance—marching, chanting, even choreographed dancing—to decry violence against women by occupying public space.1 Against this backdrop, political street art has materialized as one of the most rousing forms of visual and performative protest for mobility justice.2 Building on the groundbreaking work on public art and propaganda by LYMAN G. CHAFFEE and its adaptation by [End Page 41] street art scholars such as CLAUDIA KOZAK, HOLLY EVA RYAN, and JULIA TULKE, I use the term "political street art" as an expansive category that includes all aesthetic interventions into public space, ranging from graffiti and murals to performance, stencils, and wheat pastes.3 In distinct but interrelated ways, these scholars have highlighted the spatial politics of street art, which has the potential to give nonstate actors expression and thereby offer alternative narratives to be read by city dwellers.4 Etched into the cityscape, these unofficial histories and excluded bodies rebut orthodox notions of representation, access, and rights to space. This essay focuses on the spatial politics of street art in Brazil, where, according to Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, "urban spaces are terrains of constant struggle for blacks, women, and poor people."5 I propose that in Brazil—birthplace of both the lowbrow pixação tar painting of the dispossessed and the six-figure gallery pieces of the internationally renowned Os Gêmeos (The Twins)—political street art has become an aesthetic manifestation of Black feminism, pointing to powerful creative imbrications between gender, race, and space.6 Using Afro-Brazilian grafiteira Panmela Castro as a case study, my analysis offers a new window into the rise of intersectional thinking in Brazil, situating it at the crossroads of political street art, participatory pedagogy, and shifting media paradigms. I have chosen Castro because close attention to her art and activism reveals an evolution in her political priorities, which move from a blanket denunciation of gender-based violence to overt recognition of—and aesthetic resistance to—the disproportionate injustice and exclusion long experienced by Black Brazilian women. In what follows, I trace the ways in which Castro's racially inflected art emerged alongside her political consciousness, both concurrent with a transnational awakening in the day and age of Black Lives Matter and its Brazilian counterpart, Vidas Negras Importam. Focusing on the period of ten years from roughly 2010 to 2020 that marks a global reckoning with social justice, I showcase the concomitant transformation not only in her political street art but also in her personal appearance, each corporeal shift contributing to a whole artist, a whole person, a whole feminist and antiracist replete with intersectional identities. [End Page 42] With a constant appeal to trans-affective solidarity, Castro's art and activism (artivism) aim to build community for Afro-descendant women while creating a venue for feminist linkages across the Global South. I borrow the concept "trans-affective solidarity" from Anne Garland Mahler, whose work on Black internationalism shows how transnational alliances have historically been forged not "through the social contract provided by the state or through a narrow definition of class or race but rather through a radical openness facilitated by affective relation."7 This term is useful to understand the collective nature of street art, which speaks to an ethics and politics of care cultivated in response to the state's ruthless neoliberal neglect. Accessible to ordinary people of all walks, the physical and digital spaces in which Castro operates facilitate a feminist revolution built on camaraderie and on laying bare shared histories of oppression and resistance. This study will focus on three primary gendered geographies of Black resistance where Castro instantiates her important solidarity work. The first is the street itself, where she inscribes Black women's bodies onto urban landscapes, thereby writing them into universal history. This...