Entre corpos e contrapalavras: a transgressão como processo dialógico na cultura Hip Hop.

Abstract

This doctoral thesis examines how the verbivocovisual discourses of the documentary Nem eu sei tudo (2020) and the verbomusical discourses of songs by Baco Exu do Blues constitute discursive effects of transgression within Hip Hop Culture, particularly in Breaking dance and contemporary Rap. Specifically, it seeks to understand the alteritist relations and addressivity modes that shape these materialities; uncover the ideological threads that traverse them; and investigate the dialogic processes that produce transgredience as a situated axiological operation. The study is justified by the scarcity of research that articulates body, dance, music, and language through a discursive lens, as well as by the undeniable sociocultural relevance of Hip Hop as an active arena of resistance against racism, sexism, and the precarization of peripheral life. Anchored in the theoretical assumptions of Bakhtin and the Circle (1976; 2010; 2019), the analysis conceives language as an ideological, responsive, and alteritist practice, whose meanings emerge from the tense interplay between subjects, values, and historical-social conditions. It also dialogues with Brait and Gonçalves (2021) and Nóbrega (2010; 2018) on corporeality and the arts of the body, with Dias (2019) regarding the historicity of Hip Hop, with Mbembe (2018; 2022) on race and coloniality, with hooks (2019; 2025) on gendered structural critique, and with Paula and Serni (2017) and Souza (2010) for the verbivocovisual and verbomusical dimensions. Methodologically, it is a qualitative documentary study guided by Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA), whose corpus selection relied on dialogic pertinence between audiovisual sequences/frames and lyric-vocal excerpts, treated through an inseparable movement of description, analysis, and responsive interpretation. The results reveal three central axes. (i) Alterity: the materialities show Hip Hop as a relational enunciative arena in which the subject is not affirmed through autonomy but through responsivity to the other — whether in the dancing body dialoguing with the gaze and gestures of others, or in the lyrical voice confronting the social voices that precede it. Alterity thus emerges as an ethical principle and as the very condition of possibility for the transgressive utterance. (ii) Ideological threads in dispute: the comparison between materialities reveals race, gender, class, and territory as zones of axiological tension that destabilize hegemonic normativities — denouncing the effects of coloniality, the commodification of Blackness, patriarchal injunctions, and peripheral precarization — while also exposing internal contradictions within the movement, which must contend with hierarchies, legitimacy disputes, and ideological “in-between” positions. (iii) Transgression as process: performative movement and vocality show that transgression is not an inherent essence of Hip Hop but a situated, contradictory, and dialogic discursive effect that displaces values, reinscribes presences, and produces symbolic fractures in urban space, challenging the centripetal forces of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Transgredience here is unfinished, sustained by continuous movements of re-accentuation, counter-word, and aesthetic insurgency. It is concluded that the dancing body and the singing voice constitute dissident forces which, grounded in ethical responsivity and Bakhtinian non-finalizability, convert experiences of exclusion into aesthetically potent utterances. In doing so, they reconfigure modes of belonging and establish visibility regimes that affirm alterity as an inalienable mediator of social relations and as a political foundation of contemporary Hip Hop Culture.