"THE HOOD HAS REPERTOIRE TOO”: PERIPHERAL YOUTH POETRY AS A DISCURSIVE EVENT

Abstract

This article addresses poetry slam as a cultural practice of resistance and meaning-making in urban peripheries. The central problem investigates how this poetry, as a discursive event, challenges social inequalities and produces shifts in the hegemonic meanings attributed to youth and the peripheral territory. The objective is to analyze the discursive functioning of these poetic practices, considering the articulation between the subject-position of discourse and ideological interpellation, in the production of meanings and in the inscription of the young subject in the public space. The theoretical framework is based on materialist Discourse Analysis (DA), articulated with the perspective of intersectionality and the contributions of psychoanalysis. The DA methodology is qualitative and interpretative, analyzing the corpus composed of the poems "Eu quero ver, meu bem..." by Lucas Koka and "Deslocamento" by Mel Duarte. The results indicate that peripheral youth poetry functions as a performative discursive practice in which the intersection of class, race, gender, generation, and territory traverses the subject-position, and in which corporeality and voice are instruments of political agency, challenging stigmas. It is concluded that the tensioning of inequalities and the displacement of hegemonic meanings operate precisely in the failure of ideological interpellation, a moment in which the youth subject reinscribes their position in the discourse, resignifying the periphery as a territory of knowledge, memory, and affect, and allowing young people from urban peripheries to reinvent the present and broaden future horizons.