![]() ![]() Punk/metal music and fashions empower audiences and allow expressions of rage and protest. Body adornments would valorize the `primitive' as a protest against economic inequality and repression of the body. Each form of adornment, fashion and lifestyle can be understood as a way of claiming agency to resist domination, invert disciplinary codes and experience `utopian moments'. This can be seen in many ways: in the popularity of tattoos and piercings, in punk/metal music and lifestyles, and in `porn chic' as a fashion statement. Given such conditions, we have seen the re-emergence of the carnival, which Bakhtin saw as legitimating a variety of forms of transgressions as critique and resistance. Finally, for many, the mass-mediated commodified culture is superficial and inauthentic. People find themselves entrapped in a disenchanted, rationalized world of rules and regulations. Vast numbers of people remain alienated in their work and politically powerless to foster change. Late capitalism, in its globalized moment, has produced enormous wealth, but at the same time this wealth sustains hierarchies in which only a few benefit. For others such as Turner or Shilling, the body can be seen as a site of agency and locus of empowerment. Yet he also notes that domination fosters resistance. ![]() ![]() For Foucault, the gaze, surveillance, imposes disciplinary practices that inscribe identities upon docile bodies. One major debate concerns the nature of social control vs agency. New technologies give us the opportunity to rethink the relations between affect, embodiment,įollowing work by Michel Foucault and Bryan Turner, the body has become an important topic for social inquiry. Based on a discourse analysis of an interview with Raquel about what the nude means to her, a couple of questions are raised: What are the opportunities and the limitations offered by the cyberspace to subvert social norms? What does the online backlash that Raquel suffered tell us about how the Black female body is constructed in public media in Brazil? What does her continued desire to use nude photos tell us about the potential within this act of taking nude selfies? In a time of continuous digitalisation, with the ongoing development of new medias, the ways in which these processes happen to affect socialisation and subjectivities, it is necessary to go beyond the idea that the image is merely in-formational and explore its potential for affect and transformation of perceptive and affective structures of everyday life (Hansen, 2004). Raquel, a Black Brazilian woman living in Brazil who is also lesbian and fat, posts her nude on social media as a political statement about body positivity and anti-racist aesthetics. Given that Black women deal with an interlocking system of oppressions, one Black feminist in Brazil is creating new ways to deal with such oppressions in the digital sphere through the Internet nude. The cyberspace and its participatory culture are frequently seen as a potential place where marginalised groups could tell their stories the way they see (Hughes, 2012). ![]()
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