Ativismo em rede e processos formativos decoloniais articulados por mulheres negras no Youtube

Abstract

Since the context of slavery there are records of organization and political action of black women that indicate practices of resistance and struggle against a political regime that subordinated African and African descent populations. (WERNECK, 2005; MADEIRA, 2013; SILVA, 2014; DAVIS, 2016). Despite the end of slavery, black populations still face social problems arising from a persistent coloniality that affects social arrangements even in the present time (QUIJANO, 2005; GROSFOGUEL, 2016). Thus, the struggle of black women goes through different spheres of social life in which they seek the decolonization of bodies, minds, political, economic, social, religious, cultural and racial systems. Digital communication networks expanded the possibilities and forms of action of activist groups in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and became a space for political action, in which the actors of these networks construct narratives about their agendas and claims (CASTELLS, 1999; GOHN, 2011; DIFELICE, 2013; MALINI; ANTOUN, 2013; JUNGBLUT, 2015). In this context, this thesis presents a study on network activism and decolonial formative processes whose objective was to understand how the activism of black women on YouTube articulated decolonial formative processes. For this, we analyzed the exchanges established in the context of the postings of 32 videos on the channels of 3 black women on YouTube and the observation of their actions on the network, especially on this platform. The research had a qualitative approach and built approximations with the field of cyberspace ethnography (SEGATA & RIFFIOTIS, 2016). The methodological procedures were organized into two main actions: participant observation in the channels of three black women (research participants) and semi-structured interviews with them. In the context of networking, the actions of these vloggers constituted mediatic appropriations of a political and emancipatory character regarding the aesthetic standards of beauty built on the basis of a racist and exclusionary society as well as the articulation of activism based on their life histories and the critique of coloniality still persistent in the images produced about black populations.The research developed allowed us to understand that the activism of these three women a) articulated a narrative dispute with the traditional media in a search for the transformation of the look attributed to the aesthetics of black women, which was sometimes also related to the political agenda of black women's movements, by choosing the themes of the videos; b) proved to be the articulator of a translation of academic knowledge; c) had links to the market and consumer relations of black women; and d) operated in tension with poorly transparent commercial and other YouTube mechanisms.