The interpellation of the individual into a subject or the grammar of the subject: identities, desire, and racism in Judith Butler, Lélia Gonzalez and Grada Kilomba

Abstract

This essay aims to reflect the individual’s interpellation in subject (identities or identifications). This process materializes structurally through intelligibility in exclusive and hierarchical dichotomous pairs. In this way, initially, the focus was on a reinterpretation of Althusser’s theory of interpellation by Judith Butler. After approaching the constitution of identity processes in a broad way, assuming the post-structuralist perspective in which there is a deconstruction of the ontology of identities as essential and natural, attention was focused on the relationship between desire and racism present in the thinking of black feminist authors. Along this path, the answer was how the desire and racism intertwine in the construction of black female subjectivity. Lélia Gonzalez has as a thesis that racism is the Brazilian cultural neurosis that is a consequence of the denial of racism in the country. The desire denied by black bodies makes up such a denial, as well as the guilt of whiteness. The next point highlighted Grada Kilomba, who, in turn, highlighted language as crucial in the process of producing discourses on whiteness, about blackness - especially with regard to the Portuguese language -, thus highlighting the violence reproduced in the daily experiences of women inserted in afrodiasporic contexts.