Afro hair as a symbol of resistance: the identity of black women and the practice of a counter-hegemonic aesthetic

Abstract

The experience of black women around image and aesthetics is a topic of great relevance; firstly because it is an issue with little scientific approach; second, because it invokes a critical reading of the different forms of oppression and historical invisibilization, to which they have been subjected from the hegemonic aesthetic, and third, because in these circumstances it is necessary to make visible the way in which women resist scenarios of racism, exclusion and denial, from different initiatives that are properly articulated to natural Afro hair and the relationship they build with it. 
In this order of ideas, this paper aims to present theoretical reflections on some processes of resistance, brokered by black Columbian women from their hair, as part of the vindication of their identity and positioning towards the hegemonic aesthetic. A qualitative methodology is proposed, which uses documentary review as a technique, in order to identify different initiatives that have been investigated from research processes, to evidence the construction of identity processes in black women from natural Afro hair. Within the discussions, the need to address from the academy, the contexts of discrimination and racialization suffered by black women from their hair, to elucidate the way in which they carry out actions of resistance and collective contestation as strategies that allow not only the conservation of historical memory from the meaning that hair represents, but also but also, the strengthening of ethnic/cultural identity.