Documentário como acontecimento: raça, gênero e os sentidos do amor e afetividade em vozes negras

Abstract

This study analyzes, from the materialist strand of Discourse Analysis, the discursive construction of Black women’s affectivity in the documentary Sobre Nós (2021). The research investigates how meanings of love, desire, and care are traversed by a colonial discursive memory that articulates race, gender, and class, and how this historical archive is challenged by testimonies that constitute a political “we” of resistance. The corpus is composed of excerpts that consider the material imbrication of verbal, visual, sonic, and gestural elements (Lagazzi, 2011), treating the documentary as a discursive event that projects new assertions about the world (Ramos, 2008). The theoretical framework engages with Discourse Analysis concepts of discursive memory and interdiscourse (Pêcheux, 2014; Courtine, 2009) and sites of enunciation (Zoppi-Fontana, 1999), as well as with contributions from Black feminism (Gonzalez, 2020; hooks, 2021; Davis, 2016) and scholars in the field (França, 2024; Cestari, 2015; Modesto, 2021). The analysis unfolds along three axes. First, it examines the racial economy of affect, demonstrating how hegemonic discourses naturalize hierarchies that grant public affects to whiteness while confining Black women to spaces of neglect and private sexual objectification. Next, it focuses on mechanisms of racism denial and the necropolitical regulation of bodies (Mbembe, 2018), showing how affects such as fear operate as technologies of subjection within a political affective circuit (Safatle, 2024). Finally, it investigates strategies of resistance and collective healing, in which first-person enunciation and the re-signification of stereotypes function as gestures of aquilombamento (Nascimento, 2006), projecting meanings through a sensitive reading (Neckel, 2015). The conclusions indicate that the documentary functions as a sensitive dispositif of denunciation and reinvention, in which intimate experience is converted into a political act. By giving visibility to the psychic and physical costs of oppression and by projecting narratives of insurgent care, the work displaces stabilized meanings and contests the full humanity of Black women within the field of affectivity. The research thus contributes to understanding the discursive processes that naturalize structural violence while simultaneously opening the fissures through which dissident affective epistemologies are constructed.