Smells Like Racism in Brazil’s Hygienist Political-Affective Culture: The Process of Dejection of the Trash-Body

Abstract

This article takes the racial stigma as an object of analysis, more precisely the symbolic construction that black people are dirty, stinky and/or filthy - a discussion that has been ignored in the Brazilian racial debate. In this sense, the aim is to discuss the racist production of bodies, senses and emotions. It is argued that, in a racist society, the processes of socialization and subjectivation are structured under a hygienist political-affective culture that reinforces white racial domination while subjectively subordinating, subjecting and sanitizing-whitening black people. Thus, there is an urgent need for greater articulation between the Psy field and Social Sciences to understand the interface between health, citizenship and the sociopolitical construction of ethnicity.