IDENTITY TENSIONS: TERMINOLOGICAL INSTRUMENT RACIAL ISSUES AND FEMINISM

Abstract

The construction of terminological tools, besides its function of representation and organization of a specialty of knowledge, is presented here as an empirical reference for the identification of identity practices at the moment they are constituted as terminologies. We used a terminological tool constructed by Brazilian feminists at the end of the 1990s, the Thesaurus for Gender Studies and Women (TEG), presented by the researcher of the Carlos Chagas Foundation, Cristina Bruschini in 1998. In the decade of 90, the TEG proposed to be the synthesis instrument of a critical feminist epistemology. However, the legacies of slavery in Brazil in terms of race and gender domination and the inequalities of post-abolition society have led to different social experiences for black and white women. In this communication, we argue that the terminological instrument constructed in this process evidences the representation of a hegemonic, middle-class and white feminism, born in the academic sphere, and that it makes the feminine in it defined as a universal idea without specifying any conflict, or diversity of feminist praxis in Brazil. Anchored in Foucault's thinking, in the understanding of an economy of power relations we see in Black Feminism a form of resistance to the different types of power evidenced by the imposition of a hegemonic feminism. This confrontation of strategies between constituted power and resistance at the level of language is analyzed here through the struggle of black women in the field of feminism and distinguished by the search for empowerment through the prioritization of terms and concepts that represent the specificities of black woman.