Gender violence, state violations: a study on ways to govern territories and bodies

Abstract

This project is drawn from the interest in reflecting on state interventions that are traversed by gender-based violence. The hypothesis is that incursions into certain territories by armed State agents are closely connected with "invasions" of feminine or feminized bodies by the same agents. Following the analysis that argue that the contemporary representation of the State is constituted by and constituent of gender relations, the proposal of this research is to pursue certain political overlaps configured by two historically established logics: one that confers the legitimacy of the use of force to the state and another one that stimulates/legitimizes/composes violence due to gender power asymmetry, as proposed by Debert and Gregori (2008). Different situations of institutional violence that directly affect the feminine or feminized bodies of people living in urban peripheries will be brought to the center of the discussion in contexts of operations, incursions or occupations carried out by armed arms of the State. In this research, those who name what is violence and what is not are cisgender and transgender woman living in peripheries of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro: in this way the focus of the analysis is directed, through their eyes, to the governmental technologies that are updated through daily acts of violence. Assuming that the mechanisms of political ordering inherent to nation-states are connected to power markers necessarily articulated to gender issues, I try to understand how, through the presence of the armed arm of the state along certain bodies and territories, the social contract has been updated - understanding that the social contract is necessarily a "sexual contract", as well emphasizes Das (2008).