"Beije sua preta em praça pública": da apropriação do corpo à apropriação do espaço

Abstract

From the repeated reading of an excerpt from the poem written by Lande Onawale (1991), I started a series of questions about the presence of lesbians and black women in public spaces. After all, who can kiss “your black woman in a public square”? There are, behind the poem, a series of other imperatives that make up this “Flag” and keep it, even after twenty years, as a symbol for the black population. How could Geography help me to understand it in depth? One of the paths followed in this dissertation was to analyze how the social relations of sex, race, and class are reproduced, based on the premise that: these social relations are intertwined, with no hierarchy between them; as Carlos (2015, p. 13) states, “social relationships are carried out in the condition of spatial relationships”, so, from the analysis of spatial practices, it would be possible to find evidence of how such relationships materialize; and that absences can be as revealing of spatial practices as presences, making them a necessary dialectical pair for the development of this research. Through bibliographic and data surveys, semi-structured interviews, field visits, and photographic records, I sought to build a comparative analysis between the spatial practices carried out in Arthur Lago and Ana Lúcia Magalhães Squares, in Pernambués and Pituba, respectively, to understand how the fragmentation-articulation pair of urban space (CORREA, 1993) is reproduced in fundamentally unequal neighborhoods. This comparison, therefore, is built as we contextualize the historical formation of each neighborhood, inserting them in the Salvador, Bahia, and Brazilian contexts, to demonstrate how the divisions of labour divide the space from the process of primitive accumulation of capital to nowadays. The interpretation of the habitus, expressed by the residents through the tastes of luxury and necessity, was a central instrument for an approximation of the spatial cuts in question, in the search for a reading that did not reduce the social class to the income class, and did not reify it in the face of social relations of sex and race. In the meantime, the concepts of territory, territorialization, place, and sense of place (SERPA, 2017, 2020), engendered from the perspective of the imbrication of social relations, were fundamental to get to the question: is there a place for black women? We return, therefore, to the initial question: who can kiss their black woman in a public square?