Black Skin, Digital Masks: The Battlefield of Meanings in O Avesso da Pele

Abstract This article analyses how Jeferson Tenório’s O Avesso da Pele (2020) is read and contested in platform-based reception. Drawing on Frantz Fanon and Lélia Gonzalez, it combines close reading with qualitative analysis of Goodreads reviews. The study shows how second-person address and constrained agency foreground embodied experience and structural determination, and it identifies three recurring reception patterns: intellectual resistance, affective resonance, and canonical dissonance. These patterns demonstrate how readers negotiate the legitimacy of narrating structural racism, with formal critique often displacing structural violence into aesthetic judgement in ways consistent with racismo por denegação.