(De)Gendering Vulnerability: Unsaying Gender in Judicial Narratives of Girls’ Crimes in Brazil

• In Event: Storytelling and Erasure Among Marginalized Populations

Abstract

Under neoliberal penality, punishment is legitimized through notions of autonomy and rational choice. But how does it account for those historically perceived as non-autonomous and vulnerable? How is neoliberal penality gendered? And how does it de-gender narratives of violence? This paper examines how neoliberal penality shapes narratives of gendered violence, asking how gendered vulnerability is said and unsaid (Presser 2022) in judicial narratives about girls in illegal drug markets. The data include 40 judicial documents (2015–2022) and 34 biographical interviews with criminalized girls (2016, 2023, 2024) in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. In drug trafficking cases, judicial narratives portray girls as powerful and cunning, standing on equal ground with adult men. Their crimes are framed as rational choices within violent communities. Judges and prosecutors mobilize girls’ personalities to dismiss claims of coercion or gendered vulnerability. While drug markets are depicted as dangerous, girls’ vulnerabilities to gendered, state, and drug-market-related violence are erased. In these narratives, girls are agents of danger but never prey to it. This silencing constitutes symbolic violence, legitimizing penal harm against them within the transnational War on Drugs.

Author

• Otto Natalia, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities