A Negra Empoderada Incomoda: Policing and Incarcerating Black Women in São Paulo, Brazil

• In Event: Interdiction, Terror, and Resistance: On The Structural Positionality of Blackness in the Americas

Abstract

Why does the “negra empoderada” offend so much? For Black feminists in Brazil, this inquiry emerges as a desperate cry from the depths of the mourning Black body. To interrogate why one’s body is inherently offensive in a multi-racial society with a history of chattel African slavery is to protest and to demand a radical shift of the status quo’s relationship to Black women in particular, and to Black people in general. The perception of Black women as inherently criminal, especially when they are read as out of place, often results in over-policing and other forms of gratuitous violence regardless of actual criminal activity. Throughout Brazil, the detention of Black women has grown exponentially in the 21stcentury, at the same time that Black women are included in social and political sectors that were once inaccessible. Brazil’s “war on drugs,” disproportionately affects Black communities and has provided authorities with a legal incentive to incarcerate women and gender non-conforming bodies at a higher rate than men. This paper focuses on the policing of Black women and their social death through incarceration. Drawing from ethnographic research, I argue that the incarceration of Black women and other dissident bodies is an “erotic hatred” that requires the simultaneous possession and dispossession of a racialized and gendered body. I furthermore examine how Black feminist movements unapologetically embrace identity politics to interrupt this form of Black death.

Author

• Meryleen M Mena, University of Colorado/Boulder