“Black is Beautiful”
discourse of representation of black dolls with disabilities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46230/lef.v16i3.13217Keywords:
social semiotics, multimodality, black children’s dollsAbstract
This paper aims to investigate semiotic representations of black children's dolls - industrialized and handcrafted with disabilities ones - from the point of view of their image, of their materiality and of their packages, as a way of having access to their body configurations, as well as the design properties of these contemporary toys. Consequently, this research presents itself in a qualitative and exploratory perspective, and it has a basic nature, being the corpus formed by five black children's dolls: three of them industrialized, from a North American origin, and the other two handcrafted, coming from the north-eastern Brazilian region. It brings as a theoretical framework, mainly, the postulations of Kress and van Leeuwen (2021 [1996; 2006]) and the systemic-functional assumptions of language discussed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The results point out that the representational aspects of black dolls maximize the feeling of free expression and the belonging to a group, which can be used both for different communicative and social interaction purposes and can overcome possible situations of prejudice and new expectations about the differences that are intrinsic to us.
Key-words: Social Semiotics. Multimodality. Black Children’s Dolls.
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