Young Black Women’s Experiences and Resistance to Structural Violence: An Intersectional Feminist Participatory Study in a Brazilian Marginalized Community

Abstract

This thesis explores how young Black women living in a marginalized Brazilian community name, experience, interpret, and respond to violence. It explores how feminist participatory research based on arts-based interventions can contribute to the production of alternative discourses that give centre to these young women’s voices. Scholarship on youth and violence has often framed young people, particularly Black youth, through lenses of crime, risk, and victimhood. This study seeks to shift attention toward systems that produce unequal and violent social relations. Drawing on intersectional feminism and the concept of structural violence, the study adopts a Participatory Action Research approach with five young women aged 15 to 17 in Vargem das Flores, Minas Gerais. Data were collected through focus groups, interviews, and an arts-based photographic project. Findings show that structural violence is a recurrent phenomenon embedded in everyday life. It operates across interconnected dimensions, including space, time, relationships, institutions, and embodied experiences, assuming different forms while being sustained by shared logics of domination. At the same time, the young women’s narratives reveal critical awareness, agency, and diverse forms of resistance. By centring young women’s voices, this thesis contributes to making visible forms of violence that are often normalized and overlooked, while also demonstrating how power relations intersect and are co-constitutive. The arts-based intervention illustrates how alternative discourses can be created, enabling young women to articulate their own self-definitions. These findings highlight the importance of approaches that move beyond masculine and individual problem-oriented frameworks, opening possibilities for more just, transformative and complex understandings of youth and violence.