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Article published In:
Circulating Signs and People: Politics, affect, ethnography
Edited by Daniel N. Silva
[Pragmatics and Society 6:2] 2015
► pp. 197–216

Trajectories of the black female body in Brazil

Circulations of racist and antiracist representations on a TV show

| Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil

In this paper, I offer a situated perspective on the political and semiotic landscapes of the circulation of racist and antiracist images and texts in and around a dark-skinned female character, Adelaide, in the popular Brazilian TV show Zorra Total. I aim to differ and defer the character as a sign, in order to undermine the character’s hegemonic frame of interpretation. First, I contextualize some resources used in a typical episode, including the character’s performance as a trajectory of racist signs about the black woman’s body. Next, I discuss the contemporary circulation of the character, confronted by the experience of discussing this character in an undergraduate classroom. In conclusion, I argue that by exposing trajectories of the black female body, it is possible to gather together its fragmented signs as a multi-layered and overlapping set, and I identify these trajectories as a blind spot in the history of Brazilian racism.

Keywords: body, metapragmatics, gender, racism, entextualization, trajectory
Published online: 24 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.6.2.03pin
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