Transforme-se em você: práticas de significação em torno da diferença na publicidade de cosméticos para cabelos crespos e cacheados veiculada por mídias digitais

Abstract

In the past decades, we have experienced transformations that lead to investigating tensions and repositioning in the social representations. It can be highlighted, mostly, the institutionalization of affirmative politics such as the laws 10.639/03 and 12.711/12, and the increasing of the access to the internet in Brazil, marking a conjuncture in which the relations are mediated and monitored by communication platforms that affect the social and subjective relations. Starting from these changes, publicity has reformulated its strategies, even though it keeps resorting to the imaginary consolidated around the subjects and their identifications. Given this cut, this research had as general objective to analyze the practices of representation that build and/or reproduce meanings about the difference in the context of uses of digital media in Brazil. For that, it had as object the advertising strategies of the Salon Line company turned to the sale of cosmetics for curly and wavy hair that are transmitted through and by the social networking platforms on the internet. Three specific objectives were accomplished, namely: 1) to analyze how and what the company’s history builds about the curly and wavy hair in Brazil; 2) to analyze the practices of representing the differences through the identification of similarities and distances between the materials conveyed by the official page of the Salon Line brand in the social network platform Facebook and the materials conveyed by the Tô de Cacho page, of the same company; 3) to analyze how the propaganda strategy of the Tô de Cacho relates to the hair transition and to the mutual help groups in the platforms of social networking, aiming to comprehend if and how it articulates speeches specifics to these phenomena and whether it reiterates or not racialized forms of representation. This research was developed through an ethnographic approach, combined with text and image analysis, and interviews with Salon Line's interlocutors. Among the major considerations, it is highlighted that the advertising strategies have been approaching the theme of difference, understood here as built by processes of meaning negotiated in social relations and subjectivity. Such approximation has been mediated by the social networks on the internet and by the direct contact of the manufacturer with consumers, bloggers, and digital influencers who participate, somehow, in the form and content of signification practices. These, on the one hand, displace common ways of representing women and black people by mobilizing difference as experience and subjectivity to address social and subjective dimensions of care and agency practices around curly and wavy hair and, on the other hand, reproduce racialized meanings and stereotyped about these same subjects in some situations. Moreover, the message of transformation and current freedom in the current brand positioning can place political, cultural, and subjective transformations at the same level with fads and market trends. The message also coexists with the emphasis on defining the curls and hair length that refer to hegemonic models of beauty and the narrative of racial democracy.