“Quem pode ser a dona?”: Afro‐Brazilian women entrepreneurs and gendered racism

Demetrius Miles Murphy

Gender, Work and Organization, 2024, vol. 31, issue 4, 1149-1165

Abstract: In 2013, the number of Black entrepreneurs surpassed the number of White entrepreneurs in Brazil. Of those Black entrepreneurs, 30 percent were women. In Brazil, gendered racism often stereotypes Black women as domestic servants or hypersexual. Despite the robust literature on Afro‐Brazilians generally and Afro‐Brazilian women particularly, Afro‐Brazilian women entrepreneurs, their experiences, and their strategies for competing in the market and resisting gendered racism remain under‐theorized. I use semi‐structured interviews with Black women entrepreneurs to explain the relationship between gendered racism and Black entrepreneurship. My findings show that Afro‐Brazilian women entrepreneurs actively defy and redefine the standard images of entrepreneurs and Black women in Brazil. They contest the treatment of Black women as objects of the market by situating themselves as agentic players by challenging gendered racism through two entrepreneurial cultural strategies: (1) engaging in dignity work and (2) employing a women‐first imperative. By centering the experience of Afro‐Brazilian women, I contribute to the entrepreneurship literature, Africana Studies, and Latin American Studies.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13090

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:gender:v:31:y:2024:i:4:p:1149-1165

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0968-6673

Access Statistics for this article

Gender, Work and Organization is currently edited by David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot and Ida Sabelis

More articles in Gender, Work and Organization from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().