Gender Violence, State Violations (original) (raw)

In this ultra-short research paper, I share some of the reflections from the research project I have been developing at Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero Pagu/Unicamp, under the title "Gender Violence, State Violations: A Study on Ways of Governing Territories and Bodies." In this research, I have been following an analytical lead that points to a deep connection between violations to the right of life and other violations by State agents that are usually deemed less important (be it by specialists in violence studies, be it by human rights organizations or by the movements calling for police demilitarization). I started to outline this approach after hearing stories from women such as Mariana, whose house was raided during an operation of the 41st Military Police Battalion in the Acari favela which took place when she had already gone to work. Her 13-year-old daughter was asleep, and her 16-year-old daughter was about to leave for school. Mariana said that the policemen entered the house calling her youngest daughter a "slut" and a "whore" as they told her to get up. She also said that during that raid, one of the officers kicked her oldest daughter's back, leaving a footprint of his boot on her school uniform. Mariana concluded her account by saying: "What else are they gonna do here? Next thing, they'll be raping my daughters." Rape does not need to take place to terrify: "next thing they'll be raping", as denounced by Mariana, implies that the daily possibility of the event of a rape is precisely what allows it to be ascribed into the broader set of technologies for governmental control of bodies and territories. I would also like to emphasize that in militarized contexts such as this, "slut" and "whore" are words that need to be read as slurs that constitute a wider frame of gender violence that is also embedded in the institutional violence that is a mark of the operations such as this one, carried out by the Military Police in the North Region of Rio de Janeiro city. The raid that happened in that day left a mark not only in the memory of those three people, but also in the uniform of one of the girls: the weight of that boot that stepped hard into the

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