Black Women In Brazil Research Articles

VIOLÊNCIA OBSTÉTRICA CONTRA MULHERES NEGRAS:IMPACTOS NA SAÚDE MATERNA

Obstetric violence is a form of abuse that occurs in healthcare services, involving physical, verbal abuse, and neglect, often perpetrated by healthcare professionals. This violence has an even greater impact on Black women in Brazil, who face additional barriers to accessing prenatal care and maternity services. General Objective: To highlight how obstetric violence directly affects the lives of these women, causing emotional, physical, and maternal trauma. Methodology: This study is a bibliographic review that investigates obstetric violence, with a special focus on the experiences of Black women. The research was based on scientific articles published between 2019 and 2024, collected from databases such as BVS and SCIELO. The selection of articles included the analysis of titles, abstracts, and full readings of the texts, aiming to gather relevant information for the proposed review. Results: Obstetric violence is recognized as a serious public health issue in Brazil, where the lack of clear management policies hinders reporting and perpetuates the vulnerability of women. This situation highlights the urgent need for increased social awareness, as well as investments in the education and training of healthcare professionals, to prevent this form of violence and ensure respect for women's rights.

Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery

Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery

“Quem pode ser a dona?”: Afro‐Brazilian women entrepreneurs and gendered racism

AbstractIn 2013, the number of Black entrepreneurs surpassed the number of White entrepreneurs in Brazil. Of those Black entrepreneurs, 30 percent were women. In Brazil, gendered racism often stereotypes Black women as domestic servants or hypersexual. Despite the robust literature on Afro‐Brazilians generally and Afro‐Brazilian women particularly, Afro‐Brazilian women entrepreneurs, their experiences, and their strategies for competing in the market and resisting gendered racism remain under‐theorized. I use semi‐structured interviews with Black women entrepreneurs to explain the relationship between gendered racism and Black entrepreneurship. My findings show that Afro‐Brazilian women entrepreneurs actively defy and redefine the standard images of entrepreneurs and Black women in Brazil. They contest the treatment of Black women as objects of the market by situating themselves as agentic players by challenging gendered racism through two entrepreneurial cultural strategies: (1) engaging in dignity work and (2) employing a women‐first imperative. By centering the experience of Afro‐Brazilian women, I contribute to the entrepreneurship literature, Africana Studies, and Latin American Studies.

Sexual violence perpetrated against black Brazilian women: an integrative review

Objetivo: Analisar as evidências científicas em saúde sobre a violência sexual perpetrada contra mulheres negras no Brasil. Métodos: Revisão integrativa realizada em seis etapas, na qual a busca ocorreu em maio de 2023, nas bases de dados MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, Embase e no portal da Biblioteca Virtual de Saúde. A seleção se deu em duas etapas e, para extração das informações, utilizou-se formulário elaborado pelos autores cuja análise dos resultados se deu por meio da análise de conteúdo. Resultados: A partir da análise dos oito estudos emergiram as seguintes categorias: o perfil da violência sexual perpetrada contra mulheres negras; e a interseccionalidade e seus impactos sobre a violência sexual perpetrada contra mulheres negras. As práticas de violência sexual mais perpetradas foram o toque, a manipulação, os beijos forçados e as relações sexuais, com maior prevalência em mulheres jovens negras, que são mais culpabilizadas e responsabilizadas pela sociedade do que as demais. Conclusão: Há uma prevalência da violência sexual contra a mulher negra que, na maioria das vezes, está inserida em condições de vulnerabilidade social. Tendo em vista o racismo estrutural presente na atualidade, faz-se necessário o conhecimento desse tema a fim de promover um melhor atendimento para essas mulheres.

“A marriage without fidelity is a house without a foundation”: Black Brazilian women's demands for respect in marriage

AbstractEthnographic studies of romantic love and companionate marriage in Latin America and the Caribbean focus on why and how intimate ideologies are changing, the effects of these changes for couples and communities, and the complexities surrounding the practical and symbolic meanings of money and love. Here, I discuss how in a community in which the romantic love and companionate marriage ideals seemed unattainable due to the prevalence of infidelity, Black women emphasized the locally salient value of respect in their discourses surrounding marriage. I explore how women's and men's competing views on respect represented shifts in women's agency, household authority, and the marital bargain. I argue that the perspectives of working‐class Black Brazilian women reveal how the value of respect is central to the dignity and self‐respect of minoritized and marginalized women and why, for these women, the disrespect of infidelity was the impetus for divorce.

Lower breast cancer survival among Black women in Brazil: a population-based retrospective study

ObjectivesTo analyze the rates of breast cancer survival among Black and White women according to age and stage at diagnosis. Study designA retrospective cohort study. MethodsThe study examined women registered in the population-based cancer registry of Campinas in 2010–2014. The primary variable was the declared race (White or Black). Other races were excluded. Data were linked with the Mortality Information System, and missing information was accessed by active search. Overall survival (OS) was calculated by the Kaplan-Meier method, comparisons were done by chi-squared tests, and hazard ratios were examined by Cox regression. ResultsThe total numbers of new cases of staged breast cancer among Black and White women were 218 and 1522 cases, respectively. The rates of stages III/IV were 35.5% among White women and 43.1% among Black women (P = 0.024). The frequencies among White and Black women under 40 years old were 8.0% and 12.4% (P = 0.031), 19.6% and 26.6% (P = 0.016) for ages of 40–49 years, and 23.8% and 17.4% (P = 0.037) for ages of 60–69 years, respectively. The mean OS was 7.5 years (7.0; 8.0) among Black women and 8.4 years (8.2; 8.5) among White women. The 5-year OS was 72.3% among Black women and 80.5% among White women (P = 0.001). Black women had an age-adjusted risk of death that was 1.7 times higher (1.33; 2.20). The risk was 6.4 times higher for diagnoses in stage 0 (1.65; 24.90) and 1.5 times for diagnoses in stage IV (1.04; 2.17). ConclusionThe 5-year OS for women with breast cancer was significantly lower among Black women than White women. Black women were more frequently diagnosed in stages III/IV, and their age-adjusted risk of death was 1.7 times higher. Differences in access to care may explain these differences.

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

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...

‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’: I, a black Brazilian woman in the fight against images of control

‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’: I, a black Brazilian woman in the fight against images of control

Review of “Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery”

Review of “Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery”

Travel politicization facing biopolitics: (Im)mobilities, technological mediations, and identity discourses in collaborative hosting networks for women

This paper investigates how the biopolitical representation of travelers is affected by political activism on a collaborative hosting network for Black Brazilian women. The context of the neoliberal capitalist economy influences behaviors and the production of subjectivities that are strongly reinforced by technological and media intermediaries, such as platforms and social networks. In the scenario with tourism emerging as a biopolitical phenomenon, traveling bodies are ranked in a market logic with asymmetrical mobility (Sheller, 2017). The methodological course consisted of a literature review, an ethnography of the women's group Couchsurfing das Pretas hosted on Facebook, and a platform analysis to mediate their interactions. The results indicated a tourism politicization from the intense use of digital platforms and the valuation of identities as a biopotency movement against biopolitics discourses.

The Mass Incarceration of Black Women in Brazil*

Colonial empires establish their system of power based on white male supremacy across all spheres of society. In this process, incarceration systems were – and can still be – a key element in the preservation of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. In recent decades, extensive research has sought to expose how the incarceration system enjoys an intimate relationship with structural racism. In addition, the War on Drugs initiative accentuates these effects in Latin-American countries. From 2010 to 2014, the incarceration of women in Brazil increased by 567% (World Prison Brief, 2015). This paper, in applying an interdisciplinary approach, will briefly analyze the role of gender and race in this process and will point out how certain colonial legacies operate in Brazilian justice.

FEMALE RURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: FOCUS ON THE SUCCESSFUL CASE OF “DOCES TAMBABA”

Women with an entrepreneurial spirit and passion are able to stimulate economic activity in rural regions, even when driven by need. In this context, Brazil is a country where being an entrepreneur through need has gained increasing relevance in the economy of rural communities, where women crucially become empowered to contribute to wealth creation by creating their own job. This study focuses on a successful business led by two black women in Brazil. Given the characteristics of the business here studied, netnography was used as the scientific methodology, something that has been used to study and observe elements of rural communities. The results obtained show that women are beginning to become empowered in their rural communities, managing attractive, successful businesses, sustaining their families and contributing to their community’s economic growth. The business studied here underlines that the contact with tourists was very motivating, and what is more, the entrepreneurial process brought a number of benefits to the rural settlement. There were gains in the fields of health, leisure, income, family life, employment, education and self-esteem, and benefits understood by the local inhabitants.

Performance Leite Derramado: desafiando as imagens de controle

ABSTRACT The article proposes to analyze the performance Leite Derramado (2013) by artist Ana Musidora from the perspective of the representation of the Black mother. In this regard, we investigate the concept of controlling images by American sociologist Patricia Hill Collins and the images invoked to define black women in Brazil, by Anthropologist Lélia Gonzalez. We reflect on how Leite Derramado explores critical layers on the images/historical representations sorted according to patriarchal and slavocratic values on Black women.

Amefricanity: A Black Feminist Proposal for a Political Organization and Social Transformation

AbstractThis article analyzes the work and thought of Lélia Gonzalez on the experience of Black women in Brazil. It highlights her legacy within studies of Black Feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the importance of her articulation between sex, class, and race with the intention of understanding the social inequality Indigenous and Black women suffer. Gonzalez's political-cultural category of Amefricanity is presented in this article as an instrument of analysis specific to the region, which promotes an epistemological shift within Black feminism. This category seeks to interpret the stories and survival strategies of previous generations of Black women on the continent, as well as to learn their methods and transgressive practices of asymmetrical power relations as pedagogical processes.

Naming Performativity on Twitter

This article examines naming as a discursive performance deployed by antiracist feminists in Brazil. I analyze tweets referencing the names of three Black Brazilian women intellectuals: Marielle Franco, Lélia González and Djamila Ribeiro, seeking to unearth the way in which their names help to build counterpublic spaces of resistance involving notions of citizenship, belonging and democracy. Using platform studies and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis as a theoretical frame, I perform different operations of computational textual analysis to map most frequent users referenced and hashtags used, as well as most relevant topics. I conclude that naming grants a powerful role in building counterpublics’ identities, helping to constitute alternative intellectual traditions in Brazil. Linking a social media post with a name to a collective mobilization serves to establish and maintain cultural identity, combining ephemerality with a continuing legacy.

Essential, Yet Expendable: Brazilian Black Women and Domestic Work in the Age of COVID-19

At the intersection of racial, gender, and class marginalization, Brazilian domestic workers are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. At the height of the global pandemic, their essential worker status forced this group to commute and work in the homes of their employers instead of sheltering in place. Routinely discriminated against, undervalued, and stigmatized, Black Brazilian women are overrepresented in this profession. Black women employed as domestic workers are exponentially burdened by the political, social, and economic costs of this deadly virus. To meet the demands of these unprecedented times, this article takes on the following format: (1) a survey of the scholarly literature on Brazilian domestic work, with special attention to race and gender; (2) excerpts of a testimonial interview from Creuza Maria Oliveira, president of the national domestic workers’ union (FENATRAD), on the status of this work in Brazil during COVID-19; and (3) an intersectional assessment of Black women’s vulnerability during the pandemic through the lens of domestic work. Domestic workers’ experiences during COVID-19 reflect the ongoing challenges for all Afro-Brazilians, while providing a nuanced example of how gender and class influence the necropolitics of the virus’s impact.

The body, the house and the city: the territorialities of black women in Brazil

This article presents a discussion on the relationship between territoriality and intersectionality based on the experience of Black Brazilian women throughout the historical process that has triggered a long trajectory of struggle against racism and sexism. Bibliographical and documentary research has been used in order to discuss the territories of the body, the house and the city, understood as spaces of oppression and resistance. While these analytical categories have received considerable attention, especially within the Black feminist movement itself, few studies have explicitly or thoroughly addressed the relationship between intersectionality and territoriality based on an expanded conception of territory that goes from the body through to the city. Reflecting upon these concepts as a collective unit and through a multi-scalar perspective may help to provide greater visibility to the protagonist spaces of Black Brazilian women in their struggle for reparation, recognition and the right to exist.

Introduction

Introduction

Racismo estrutural e violência institucional no campo da política

O artigo visa refletir sobre as expressões do racismo estrutural na realidade brasileira, considerando o lócus do exercício da política, no âmbito do legislativo municipal, que para além disputa de projetos societários, vem evidenciando a violência sofrida por corpos negros/as e LGBTQIA+ que conflitam com o perfil inscrito no sistema de privilégios na forma de sociabilidade capitalista. Reconhecemos, a partir de uma abordagem crítica, inscrita no materialismo histórico dialético, a interseccionalidade na abordagem teórico-prática entre raça, classe e gênero. Sob essa perspectiva partimos da realidade de violência vivida por mulheres negras no Brasil, considerando seus agravos em tempos de pandemia da Covid-19. Na sequência buscamos elucidar o significado do racismo estrutural e da violência racial e suas repercussões no campo da política. Por fim, problematizamos algumas estratégias de enfrentamento a violência racial na política, com vistas a incidir numa pauta de lutas pela garantia de direitos humanos em tempos de barbárie.

Black Women in Parliament and on Social Media: Link Visibility as an Intersectional and Solidarity-Building Tool

This article tackles the multiple facets of visibility, ranging from invisibility, a lack of recognition in society, to hypervisibility, when bodies are hyperexposed for commodification or criminalization purposes. We analyze the specific implications of achieving media visibility for one Black Brazilian woman in politics: Renata Souza, a Rio de Janeiro state legislator. Souza’s campaign and mandate have drawn inspiration from the legacy of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian favela-born city councillor and human rights advocate who was murdered in March 2018. Our theoretical framework consists of three strands of research: visibility studies, intersectional feminism, and intersectional work on technologies and surveillance. We draw from autoethnographic approaches with the use of field notes, audio diaries, and interviews with members of Souza’s staff. We complement these with digital ethnographic observations of Souza’s and her allies’ social media profiles. We ask: If visibility is a goal for groups that are marginalized and silenced, what happens when they achieve it? When does visibility help to protect Black women? And when does visibility bring even greater vulnerability? In this article, we propose and define the concept of “link visibility” as a process led by women of color who need a high degree of social media publicness but are affected disproportionately by visibility-induced high levels of vulnerability. We argue that link visibility represents an intersectional feminist approach as well as a tool for solidarity building, and that both—intersectionality and link visibility—help bind oppressed realities in Brazil and elsewhere. Finally, we interrogate what can be done to protect women of color online, stopping the violence, threats, and fear.