¿Qué vendes morena?: unpacking the bodily territorialization of Black women in Buenos Aires

Abstract

A recurring experience for many Black women in Buenos Aires is the assumption that they are ‘prostitutes’. This article examines how assumptions that violate the black feminine body by assigning it stigmatized roles become trivialized and normalized in Argentina, a nation many Argentines claim is devoid of antiblack racism. I draw from the concepts of ‘bodily territorialization’, ‘space invaders’, and ‘overdetermined nominative properties’, as conceptualized by feminist scholars, to analyse assumptions about Black women in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My analysis entails a critical reading of cultural texts and images, blog posts, interview data, and autoethnographic accounts. My data show that the territorialization of Black women is rooted in colonial histories and contemporarily reproduced through misrecognitions. I argue that such a reading offers a decolonial feminist vantage point from which to explicate the processes by which ‘overdetermined nominative properties’ of Black women become trivialized and normalized in Argentina.