Abstract

JARRIN, Alvaro. Del blackface y la “nariz negroide”: la biopolítica de la fealdad en el Brasil. Avá [online]. 2017, n.31, pp.143-158. ISSN 1851-1694.

This article explores how ugliness is produced as a form of affect and a biopolitical category within the Brazilian context. Based on three years of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Brazil, I make the case that bodily aesthetics is an arena where racial conflict plays out in Brazil. My two main objects of analysis are the use of blackface within Brazilian popular culture, and the construction of the black body as unattractive within medical schools that teach plastic surgery in Brazil. The devaluation of blackness through these technologies of racialization is a crucial way in which whiteness produces itself as distinct and superior to blackness in Brazil, but it also demonstrates its instability and the anxieties on which it is founded.

Keywords : Brazil; Beauty; Race; Biopolitics.

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