Embodied Power: Deconstructing White Innocence in State-Corporate Crime

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on State-Corporate Power

Abstract

This paper examines how structures of power—capitalism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and coloniality—imbricate in crimes of the powerful. Through a transnational case study of the asbestos industry from Brazil's standpoint, the research demonstrates how "white ignorance" and "white innocence" operate to normalize harmful economic and political activities. The analysis reveals how the concept of the "modern man" and the limitlessness associated with masculinity provide epistemological foundations for the current ecological crisis, driven by insatiable capital accumulation. The paper investigates how resistance emerges from modernity's "others"—those whose bodies, knowledge, and territories have been subjected to dispossession, violence, and criminalization. Racializing and genderizing the powerful" challenges colour blindness in studying corporate crime and denaturalizes the notion that economic systems are neutral or that corporate and state entities have "no-body." Behind genocidal and ecocidal decisions are actual embodied actors whose positions and privileges must be unveiled and critically examined to be possible to build transformative justice from a pluriverse of actors who challenge the Western cosmoperception.

Author

• Marilia De Nardin Budo, Federal University of Santa Catarina