The violent art of making do: Gendered narratives of criminalized girls in Southern Brazil

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Modes and Explanations of Violence

Abstract

Urban sociologists and criminologist have studied how accumulated structural disadvantages might foster so-called oppositional cultures that reinforce interpersonal violence in marginalized communities. Research has investigated how teenage girls negotiate traditional gender norms and local gendered-survival strategies in such contexts. Still, little is known about teenage girls’ involvement with lethal violence and how they make sense of their actions in light of their gendered identities. This paper investigates how violent practices are reconciled with self-conceptions of femininity in narratives of criminalized teenage girls who committed or attempted homicide. Data comes from 13 biographical interviews with adolescent girls incarcerated in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Drawing from Bourdieusian theory and narrative criminology, I examine how gendered social structures shape how girls produce intelligible and morally coherent accounts of their crimes. I found that girls convey three kinds of narrative habitus with different frames for violence: violence as a gendered resource, as a gendered failure, and as a gendered dilemma.

Author

• Natalia Otto, University of Toronto