The use of images in Geography textbooks: an anti-racist look at the (in)visibility of black women

Abstract

This article discusses genderised racism and the (in)visibility of black women in the representations in Geography textbooks approved in the 2014, 2020 and 2024 PNLD. The aim is to understand how images, which are not neutral, act as devices of power and symbolic control that sustain racism and sexism in education. The study is based on the reading of images, understood as an interpretative and cultural process, in which the gaze is always socially situated and ideologically orientated. The research therefore analyses ‘control images’, defined by Patricia Hill Collins (2019) as stereotypical representations that perpetuate racial and gender inequalities. Described as a documentar study, the research is conducted through an analysis of the images, seeking to investigate how these women are represented or silenced, observing how gendered racism permeates the narratives in textbooks, constructing images marked by absence, exoticisation, and colonialist and racist stereotypes: of subordination, submission, hypersexualisation or association with hunger and poverty. As a result, she observed from an intersectional perspective that the representations of black women show that, even in recent materials, images persist that reproduce historically constructed stereotypes and reinforce structures of power and oppression that naturalise social and racial inequalities.