"(Nappy, kinky and curly) hair up, leading me to leap" amid the ressignification of black women identities in social and organizational contexts

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the resignification processes of the black women identities occurring through the so-called transition to natural hair and the way society and organizations have reacted to this resignification. The study contributes to the Organizational Studies field by problematizing identities under construction that pass through various social and organizational spaces that need to be rethought in order to understand this process as much broader than merely aesthetic in the strict sense of this term. The research is qualitative and involved interviews with semistructured scripts with women who have been or are going through the transition to natural hair, whose discursive statements were analyzed through the theoretical-methodological approach of the french discourse analysis. The main results show that the interviewees, when passing through the transition to natural hair, had their identities resignified and such resignification brought relevant changes in their relations in society and in organizations.

Keywords

• mulher negra
• identidades
• transição capilar
• cabelo afro
• raça