July 22, 2022

Feminist Studies

Madalena Duarte

Since 2015, Brazil has had its own legislation on the crime of feminicide, motivated by a wave of criminal reforms in Latin America and the excess of murders of women. The process of criminalizing feminicide in the region, although marked by debates and questions about its convenience, was promoted by the feminist movement and it is a manifestation, in the legal field, of making political and social view of the murder of women and all the structural discrimination that affects it. Beyond the debate on its criminalization, it is also important to analyze how the crime of feminicide is perceived and interpreted by law. In view of this, this thesis at investigating which narratives contained in the judicious decisions about the crimes of feminicides of Brazilian courts - 129 court decisions of the state courts s of Brazil in 2018 were analyzed. The investigation is based on the epistemological matrix and feminist legal methods, enabling the qualitative character in the reflection of empirical data, through Content Analysis. The narratives contained in court decisions interpret the crime of feminicide as another crime of homicide, disregarding the entire symbolic process and history of struggle for recognition of deaths of women for being women. This generates a conceptual payment of feminicide, and also its disconnection from both the previous violence practiced by the feminicide perpetrator and the structural causes that precede the crime. If on the one hand feminicide is regarded as another type of homicide, on the other hand, feminicide perpetrator is constantly described, in the narrative, as an average man, who committed a biographical slip by killing a woman and, therefore, differentiates himself, above all, from the "usual" killer. The centrality of the narratives lies in women. As a consequence, gender assumptions are based on the victim- feminicide perpetrator relationship, in which the evaluation of the victims' behavior is especially considered. Judicial decisions create, although in a non-linear or exclusive way, an "ideal "type of victim that is linked to an " ideal "type of feminicide perpetrator, constructing a specific typology of crimes of feminicide. In this context, the competing narratives are considered those that are freed from stereotypes or refute them, especially those of gender, victim, feminicide, violence and feminicides. There are fragments of these narratives present in the analyzed sample that already demonstrate some progress in relation to many of their other arguments, but do not emphatically challenge the stereotypes and much less are free of them. In the end, as a reflexive exercise, some alternatives are presented that can contribute to new ways of arguing and deciding on crimes of feminicide.

KEYWORDS: feminicide, court decisions, victim, feminist legal theory