Favela urban youth and subjectivities: narratives of (re)existence in cultural territories

Abstract

This article presents certain singular lines of subjectivation experienced by youth as aesthetic-cultural production that configures the slum as existential territory. We intend to contribute to the discussion of the relationship between socio-spatial hierarchization of cities and the processes of subjectivation in a critical way to the processes of victimization, criminalization and juvenile stigmatization. We seek to guide a study with the subjects and not on the subjects. Three young people involved in autonomous cultural actions in the territory (such as sarau, cinema, hip hop) were accompanied in these and other activities of their daily life in an ethnographic perspective, described in the field diary, as well as through interviews in oral history. These were transcribed, textualized, transcribed and organized into thematic categories. We privilege the categories related to “territory” and “aesthetic inventions in the slum” that allowed us to show that the engagement of youth in the aesthetic production in the periphery operates as a tactic, a strategy of struggle against the hegemonic states of domination and stigmatization present there. The art agency possibilities of invention of existential territories and of new ways to subjectivate itself when the stigma becomes emblem; in pride of being young, black, poor and peripheral.