Saturday December 6, 2025 | 1:45PM-3:30PM

LBC 210 McKeever

Session Abstract

This panel carefully considers the ways that media and visual culture both reflect and work to influence social and political realities in the context of Brazil. The panel analyzes questions of race, gender, religion, sexuality, physicality, regionality, and nationality as they are manifested through their representations and reverberations across photography, visual art, and social media. Each panelist tackles their own interpretation to the question of what threads communities together, whether it be a museum, urban spaces, or a gym. More specifically, they ask “How do photography, digital media, and museum exhibitions use bodies and identities as sites for theoretical development?” This panel proposes a careful examination of the transformation of the body and identity through media and visual culture. Its emphasis on Brazilian culture is critical and timely, as each presenter demonstrates that these methods not only thread communities together, but are also intrinsically connected to and inseparable from Brazilian politics and global histories of race and nationalism. In this context, the body has become a transformative landscape where artists, influencers, and curators have interrogated, celebrated, and theorized the body to propose new ways of thinking about national, religious, and racial identities. The consequences of these transformations have shaped Brazil’s political and artistic terrains and these papers are a glimpse into the world of Brazilian media in attempts to further understand Brazil’s role as cultural shaper and influencer.

Presenters

• Watufani Poe (Tulane University, chair and moderator)

• Sarah Brokenborough (Tulane University), “Curating an Afro-America Between Brazil and the United States”

In the aftermath of the critically acclaimed Histórias Afro-Atlânticas exhibition (2018), global attention to Black diasporic art has intensified, particularly in light of the transnational impact of George Floyd protests which heightened conversations around both “Black Lives Matter” and “Black Art Matters.” Within this context, Black diasporic art has increasingly been positioned as a critical site for interrogating systemic racism, police violence, and constructions of identity.

Afro-Brazilian artists have increasingly been included in exhibitions, both within and outside of Brazil, that focus on Black experiences in the Americas. Government-supported shows such as Ancestral: Afro-Americás (2024–2025), Encruzilhadas da Arte Afro‑brasileira (2025), In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World (2025) all discuss themes of slavery memory, race, and place. My presentation examines how these traveling exhibitions feature artworks by Afro-Brazilians and African Americans to construct narratives of a shared racialized experience.

This presentation analyzes the deployment of Black transnationalism as a curatorial framework that serves certain political and cultural objectives. These three exhibitions position Afro-Brazilian art not only as national heritage but as part of a broader hemispheric conversation around Blackness, memory, and identity, and as a corollary to a (hegemonic) Black American experience. This paper questions why certain themes (e.g. police violence, cultural retention, resistance) translate more readily between Brazil and the United States, and what curatorial frameworks have enabled or constrained these transnational conversations. As interest in Black life and art faces a cultural retraction, the stakes of sustaining Afro-American curatorial networks grow more urgent.

• Jacqueline Amezcua (Tulane University), “Race and National Identity in Photographs of Brazilian Ballroom”

 In 2022 Brazil faced an election race between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a battle between the conservative right and liberal left, and amidst preparations for a World Cup drawing global eyes to Brazil, symbols of Brazilian nationalism could be found on street corners and apartment windows, and in the small city of Aracaju in the northeastern state of Sergipe, a group of people within the LGBTQIA+ community rose to adopt a new form of symbolic resistance through the performative nature of ballrooms. This paper explores the impact of ballroom culture as seen through the dynamic photographs captured by local photographer Joseph Chrstopher. Specifically, I analyze how Christopher’s photographs subvert racialized symbols of Brazilianness, telling a racial history of Brazil and representing a complex reclamation of the same symbols used to exclude black and LGBTQ people from the shifting national identity.

• Brenda Borges Aguiar (Tulane University). “Lifting for the Lord: The Intersection of Faith and Gym Culture Online”

In recent years, a growing number of religious influencers in Brazil have begun blending faith with fitness, presenting the gym not only as a space for physical transformation but also as a place for spiritual discipline. This emerging trend reshapes how religion appears in digital culture, especially among younger audiences who once saw religiosity as outdated or even embarrassing. Today, waking up at 4 a.m. to pray and work out is seen as a sign of commitment, self-control, and divine purpose. This paper explores how faith is being rebranded through the language and aesthetics of self-improvement. I argue that religious fitness influencers link physical effort, body transformation, and spiritual devotion in a way that suggests a person’s relationship with God can be measured through discipline and visible results. Just as the prosperity gospel once associated religious faith with financial success, these figures now present

the body as a reflection of spiritual strength. In this logic, a fit and sculpted body becomes both a sign of divine connection and a reward for moral effort. My research asks: how is the relationship between religion and the body being reshaped through digital gym culture? Based on visual and discourse analysis of Instagram and TikTok content, I explore how these influencers construct narratives around faith, fitness, and self-worth, and what these performances reveal about current ideas of obedience and moral success in Brazil.

• Williamys Melo (University of Santa Catarina), “Communication and Racialized Power: Media as a Mechanism of White Supremacy”

White supremacy is understood as a system of privileges that structures societies marked by racial inequality and is sustained through the strategic presence of white individuals in decision-making spaces, which grants them control over the means of production, communication, and political institutions of the State. The present study aims to examine how the media underpin and reinforce white supremacy. This system is maintained through violence, the arbitrary imposition of social norms, and the subjugation of non-white populations, with the purpose of preserving wealth, power, and status for the benefit of the white community. White supremacy also shapes subjectivities, producing ways of being and living that reinforce its logic of domination. Thus, how do the media constitute one of the pillars of white supremacy in Brazil? The so-called diversity campaign launched by Coca-Cola Brazil in 2017 exposed, in an emblematic way, the contradictions of corporate discourse on inclusion: seven white men were responsible for leading an initiative supposedly aimed at diversity in a country where the majority of the population is Black. Similarly, SBT, in its “Happy 2021” campaign, presented an image featuring 27 white people, implicitly conveying the idea of a celebration restricted to whiteness. These episodes highlight how white power continues to determine who appears, who speaks, and who is legitimized in the public sphere. White supremacy, in this sense, operates as a social system that establishes racial hierarchies, controls key sectors of society, and naturalizes privileges for white people. This logic sustains a hegemonic order across the economic, political, judicial, educational, and cultural domains, perpetuating inequality and exclusion. Critically analyzing the ideological mechanisms that sustain this model is essential for confronting racism.