Bodies That Cannot Weep: Forbidden Affects and the Denial of Black Masculinities’ Subjectivities

Abstract

This article analyzes how racism operates as a mode of producing absences, repressions, and affective silencing in the trajectories of Black men in Brazil. Drawing on an intersectional approach that articulates race, gender, and class, it investigates the crisis of affectivity and the denial of subjectivity in Black masculinities as historical and structural effects of racism. The study assumes that racism functions not only as a force of exclusion but also as a social technology that shapes affects, subjectivities, and imaginaries. Based on empirical data, recent research, and theoretical frameworks by authors such as Lélia Gonzalez, bell hooks, Neusa Santos Souza, Grada Kilomba, and Milton Ribeiro, five analytical axes are examined: racism as a producer of absences, emotional hardness, masculinities marked by violence, affective silencing, and symbolic dehumanization. The article argues that reconstructing narratives about Black men requires acknowledging affectivity as a political, reparative, and fundamental dimension for the rehumanization of racial and gender relations.