Para além da visão: percepção racial e a crítica ao paradigma visuocêntrico na experiência de um cego congênito

Abstract

Despite the advancement of constructionist approaches to race, we still encounter difficulty in deconstructing common assumptions about racial differences. In Brazil, this difficulty has manifested in a particularly concerning manner, both in academic and political spheres. Specifically, this is reflected in the persistence of treating physical appearance as an epistemological starting point to explain racial discrimination and its related effects. In this work, I argue that the belief that racial perception results from visual apprehension of physical characteristics is directly linked to the idea that the visual sense is inherently capable of providing objective information about reality. This thesis is a critique of the visuocentric paradigm, by which racial perception has been understood as an essentially visual phenomenon. To this end, I conduct a study of racial perception from the perspective of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics. The research begins with a broad contextualization of the phenomenon, considering its historical-sociological, anthropological, and psychosocial aspects, with an emphasis on its manifestation in the Brazilian context. I then introduce the concept of “racialized body images” as a unit of analysis, proposing an understanding of racial perception as a psychocultural phenomenon. Finally, a single case study was conducted, involving in-depth interviews with a congenitally blind person. Through this, I aimed to demonstrate that our ability to perceive race goes beyond vision, constituting an inherently constructive process driven by intersubjective demands that lead to the active and integrated participation of individuals in a racialized society.