TY - JOUR
AU - Otto,, Natália
AB - Abstract This paper examines how criminalized teenage girls who have committed homicide reconcile violent practices with self-conceptions of femininity in their personal narratives. Data come from 13 biographical interviews with adolescent girls incarcerated in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Drawing from Bourdieusian theory and narrative criminology, I examine how gendered social structures shape how girls produce intelligible and morally coherent accounts of their crimes. I found that girls share a narrative habitus that allows for three different frames to make sense of violence: violence as a gendered resource, as a gendered failure and as a gendered dilemma. This paper contributes to a growing feminist narrative criminology that investigates how personal narratives of violence are embedded in gendered social structures. Introduction When Gabriela went out to settle a conflict with her boss, she was not expecting to kill him herself. A manager of a drug-selling spot since she was 13, Gabriela and her co-workers organized a ‘mutiny’ against the male leader of their drug-selling group because he was excessively violent. Gabriela was the designated driver for the ordeal, which involved abducting and killing him by the side of a road. But she had to take matters into her own hands when the boys that accompanied her ‘chickened out’ and refused to pull the trigger. She was 17. At 16, and three-months pregnant with her second child, Ana scrubbed the floors of her house clean after her father’s murder. The homicide was a family effort, set into motion by Ana, her husband and her mother. The father’s occasional visits to Ana’s house left behind a trail of destruction: he abused her mother and sexually harassed her older sister. Ana did ‘what she had to do’. Ana, Gabriela and the other girls interviewed for this paper live in urban areas in southern Brazil. They grew up and came of age in the context of an increasingly precarious labour market, a militarized police state, an ever-more violent and profitable illicit drug economy and a long-standing patriarchal culture that severely punishes women who do not conform to gender expectations. At first sight, Gabriela and Ana embody a dichotomy between ‘volition and victimization’ (Maher 2000: 2) long debated in the literature about women’s violence (Batchelor 2005; Miller 2008; Jones 2010; Fleetwood 2016; Grundetjern and Miller 2019). Volition accounts emphasize women’s agency, gender-defying strategies and the use of violence to achieve personal gains like money or power (e.g. Grundetjern and Miller 2019). Victimization accounts focus on women’s lawbreaking as a last-resort response to gender inequality and male violence. It might seem, at first glance, that Gabriela’s narrative is one of agency and that Ana would craft a narrative of powerlessness and victimization. But, as this article demonstrates, women’s narratives about violence in Brazil defy such expectations. Women’s involvement in serious violence is underresearched and under-theorized in criminology. Research on the matter has focused on causal gendered pathways to crime and violence (Daly 1998; Heimer and Kruttschnitt 2005), violence in the context of intimate relationships (Saunders 1986; Dobash and Dobash 2004; Ajzenstadt 2009) and, more recently, girls’ violent practices within gangs and peer groups (Giordano 1978; Messerschmidt 2002; Miller 2008; Young 2009; Jones 2010; Ness 2010; Irwin and Adler 2012; Like and Cobbina 2019). Less is known, however, about how women themselves conceptualize and talk about lethal violence. Few scholars have examined how women depict and characterize their involvement in violent crimes and ‘even fewer have moved out of the realm of what might be considered the somewhat atypical act of violence, homicide’ (Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez 2006: 322). Research has shown that women’s motives to commit violence often do not differ substantially from men’s. Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez (2006) found that protecting one’s reputation and demanding respect—motives commonly associated with ‘doing masculinity’ in criminal settings (see Bourgois 2003; Messerschmidt 2013)—are also present in women’s account of their crimes (Anderson 1994; Messerschmidt 2002; Batchelor 2005; Ness 2010). Yet, if women’s motives might be similar to those of men, the ways in which they make sense of themselves as actors of violence can be deeply gendered. Recent studies have investigated how drug mules make gender-appropriate accounts of their crimes (Fleetwood 2015) and how methamphetamine users make sense of their drug consumption (Miller et al. 2015). They found that women resort to traditional cultural schemas about femininity to explicate their actions: care for family members and manipulation by romantic partners, in the case of drug mules; motherhood and beauty standards, in the case of drug-users. But while a narrative frame of care might fit stories of drug use and drug trafficking, less is known about how women reconcile their gendered identities with the act of killing. Narrative criminologists suggest that analyzing personal narratives can bridge the divide between interpretations of women’s violence that focus on agency and structure. They call for an understanding of self-narratives as dialectic, ‘as agency conditioned by context’ (Sandberg and Fleetwood 2017: 11). More recent scholarship calls for a Bourdieusian approach to narrative criminology (Grundetjern and Sandberg 2012; Caputo-Levine 2013; Fleetwood 2016; Shammas and Sandberg 2016; Page and Goodman 2018; Sandberg and Fleetwood 2017). Bringing social domination to the front stage, a Bourdieusian narrative criminology investigates how personal narratives are embedded in symbolic violence and, as such, naturalize and reproduce social inequalities. While traditional narrative analysis focuses on individuals, a Bourdieusian perspective highlights how stories are shared by people in similar positions in the social structure. Social structure, under this perspective, ‘functions like an ensemble of offers and appeals, bids, solicitations, and prohibitions, […] a system of expressive possibilities and impossibilities that prohibits or encourages different psychological processes’ (Bourdieu 2000: 512). As such, this paper investigates the narrative ‘space of possibilities’ in which girls are able to tell their stories of violence. Within this feminist and Bourdieusian tradition, I use Fleetwood’s (2016) concept of narrative habitus to interpret the narratives produced by criminalized girls as embodied knowledge, produced by and (re)productive of social structures. I investigate how violent practices are reconciled with self-conceptions of femininity in narratives of criminalized Brazilian teenage girls who committed or attempted homicide. I identify how they ascribe different meanings to the practice of violence to tell intelligible and morally coherent accounts of their crimes. Through these narratives, I assess how girls conceive of ‘the order of things’ (Bourdieu 2000: 61), i.e. the socially appropriate ways in which femininity and violence can be made sense of, reconciled and justified. I found that girls share a narrative habitus that allows for three different frames for violence: as a gendered resource, as a gendered failure and as a gendered dilemma. Narrating Women’s Violence: Between Victimization and Volition Criminology has long focused on the narrative of offenders. Sykes and Matza’s (1957) study on the ‘techniques of neutralization’ criminalized youth employ to justify their actions is arguably the earliest example. Scholars have analyzed criminalized individuals’ narratives to understand violent moral projects (Katz 1990), formula stories (Brookman et al. 2011) and desistance (Giordano et al. 2002; Maruna 2007). Presser (2009) summarized these coinciding developments and set a research agenda for narrative criminology based on the premise that stories motivate and legitimize harm (Presser and Sandberg 2015). Since then, the narrative paradigm has studied interpersonal violence (Brookman 2015; Ugelvik 2015; Hochstetler et al. 2017), drug use and drug trafficking (Sandberg and Pedersen 2011; Fleetwood 2015; Grundetjern 2015; Miller and Carbone-Lopez 2015; Miller et al. 2015; Dickinson and Wright 2017) and mass murder (Presser 2012). Yet, thus far, little attention has been given to women’s stories (Guo 2012; Miller et al. 2015; Fleetwood 2015; Gilmer 2019; Kruttschnitt and Kang 2019). Feminist approaches to narrative criminology can contribute to debates in the literature about women and crime. One of these debates is the dichotomization of women’s violence as tales of victimization or volition (Maher 2000)—i.e. as signifiers of structural oppression or agentic behaviour (Ajzenstadt 2009; Banwell 2010). Studies that focus on the former emphasize criminalized women’s victimization, especially by male violence. One notable example is Daly’s ‘street woman scenario’ (Daly 1998). Despite the relevance of structural approaches, scholars claim that this perspective has failed to unravel the ‘black box’ that connects women’s crimes to their prior abuse (Daly 1998; Fleetwood 2015). On the other side of the structure versus agency dichotomy, studies call attention to women’s bounded agency in contexts of criminality. Most of this research is informed by the ‘doing gender’ framework. Under this perspective, ‘gender is best understood as socially produced in the ongoing interactions of everyday life’ (Miller and Carbone-Lopez 2015: 694). These studies investigate how girls and women negotiate traditional gender norms and local gendered-survival strategies in contexts of urban violence (Miller 2008; Jones 2010). Findings show that teenagers are expected to perform femininity through heterosexual relationships and compliance with beauty standards while also cultivating a ‘tough’ reputation to deter violence (Messerschmidt 2002; Ness 2010). In some contexts, women reject femininity altogether and see themselves as ‘one of the guys’ (Miller 2001) or mobilize contradictory representations of femininity, some culturally hegemonic and some specific to their social locations (Grundetjern 2015; De Coster and Heimer 2017; Henriksen 2017). These studies have given insightful new directions for understanding women’s agency in criminalized settings. Nonetheless, their approach can overemphasize the rational and strategical components of gender performance and overlook the ‘more persistent, yet often invisible, facets of gender inequality’ (Miller and Carbone-Lopez 2015: 694). Fleetwood (2015) suggests that this ‘oversimplification’ of women’s lawbreaking is due to a lack of focus on the discursive and symbolic components of gender that inform criminalized women’s self-conceptions and practices. Narrative analysis offers a solution to this problem: narratives reflect both social structure and agency because they are the result of a reflexive rearrangement of memories but are also constrained by culturally available discourses (Fleetwood 2015). Focusing on language and discourse can highlight how gendered meanings not only inform situated actions and rational survival strategies but also ‘reflect… prevailing patterns of hegemony in the economic, political, and cultural contexts wherein human lives are situated’ (McAdams 2008: 247 apud Miller et al. 2015). Still, narrative criminology can only do so if it overcomes its own ‘problematic dualism’ in which agency is located in the individuals’ narrative creativity and structure in culture (Fleetwood 2016). Too much volition has been granted to storytelling. To address that, Sandberg and Fleetwood (2017) call for a narrative criminology that draws from Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s theory is particularly fitting to this project because it considers how ‘wider cultural and social structures such as poverty, unemployment and class interact at the individual and group level to shape unconscious behaviours and dispositions’ (Moyle and Coomber 2017: 3 apud Sandberg and Fleetwood 2017). Admittedly, the usefulness of Bourdieu’s theory to tackle matters of agency and structure is contested. His scholarship is criticized across different fields for being overly deterministic (Sewell 1992), engaging in circular argumentation (Jenkins 1982) and denying agents’ reflexivity (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999). Within feminist studies, Bourdieu has been criticized for a lack of emphasis on gender in his theory of practice (Reay 2005) and for the simplified generalizations of his ethnographic accounts in Masculine Domination (2001; see Witz 2005 for a critique). However, scholars have recently worked ‘with and against’ Bourdieu to reclaim his theory and address feminist concerns with agency and structure (see Adkins and Skeggs 2005). McNay (2005) proposes that there is space for contradiction and change within the habitus (as Bourdieu himself argued with the notions of ‘cleft habitus’ and ‘double bind’). In this paper, I follow her call for a feminist theory of the habitus that emphasizes the embodied dialectical relationship between subjective lived experiences and objective social structures. Agency and structure meet in the habitus. The habitus is a scheme of perceptions and representations that allow individuals to establish adaptable and renewable strategies to navigate social life. These strategies, however, are always constrained within the limits of social structures. The habitus is formed by the incorporation of social knowledge through lived experiences (Bourdieu 2000: 169). It is an embodied sense of prohibitions—a feeling that ‘some things are not for the likes of me’—that constrains individuals’ practices. The habitus also encourages particular practices and makes them intelligible, rendering life and suffering bearable by making ‘virtue out of necessities’ (Bourdieu 2000: 143). This practical knowledge learned ‘through the body’ (Bourdieu 2000: 172) is relevant to narrative and feminist criminology because it speaks of prohibitions and justifications that are not always rational but reasonable and taken for granted. Therefore, a Bourdieusian approach is fitting to investigate the ‘narrative needs’ (Bruner 1991) of criminalized individuals. Their stories are not just interpretations of events but interpretations of how events ought to be explained and justified in an intelligible manner. As such, they reveal the structural constraints imposed on the narrator since pathways to morality and redemption are deeply bounded by cultural scripts of gender, race and class. Under this perspective, gender is not a deterministic structure but an open system of bodily dispositions—of ‘regulated freedoms’—that are strong but not eternal (Bourdieu 2000). Fleetwood (2016) mobilizes the concept of ‘narrative habitus’ to account for a Bourdieusian analysis of narratives. While it is not possible to capture individuals’ habitus solely through narratives, one can apprehend parts of an individual’s scheme of perceptions through a story. Bourdieu sees the habitus as an internalization of one’s position in the social space. Thus, the narrative habitus is the internalization of the narrative doxa of this position—vocabulary, genres, identities, characters and clichés that are available to an individual to construct a coherent narrative. Accordingly, the narrative habitus structures people’s stories and identities (Fleetwood 2016: 9). It guides interpretations and actions. People cannot choose from an infinite pool of language and meaning; they rely on forms of representation and self-representation they have already learned and mobilized elsewhere. As such, the narrative habitus framework allows for the analysis of hegemonic storylines. It showcases how each narrative has creative limitations and how these limitations relate to one’s social position in terms of gender, race, class and place. Since a Bourdieusian analysis understand stories as embedded in objective social and economic structures (Sandberg and Fleetwood 2017), I now turn to a discussion of violence and gendered relations in Brazil. Brazilian Guerreiras: Gendered Loyalty Among Everyday Violence Brazil is a peculiar country for investigating gendered practices within violent urban settings for two reasons. First, Brazil differs from North America in the rate of violent crime recorded in urban settings. The country has experienced growing rates of lethal violence since the 1990s. Porto Alegre, where the fieldwork for this research took place, was the 39th most violent city in the world in 2017, with a homicide rate of 40.96 per 100,000 inhabitants. Among young people, the rates are even higher. In 2011, in the same city, the homicide rate for individuals between 15 and 24 was 82.9 per 100,000 inhabitants (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE] 2017). Not only the rate of homicide is higher, but one could also claim that the cultural conceptions surrounding violence are different in South America. Interpersonal violence is portrayed in North American criminological literature as a rupture of the social fabric, even when it is informed by a ‘code’ (see Anderson 1994). Violence is understood as an exception and ‘oppositional’, and its use and justification are necessarily founded in localized community values and beliefs that are contrary to so-called middle-class values. Approaches from the Global South have recently challenged this perspective, framing violence as a core component of all social relations, not as an exception rooted in divergent values or institutions (Walby 2013). In ‘violent democracies’ (von Holdt 2013), such as Brazil and other Latin American countries, violence is better understood as a continuum that ranges from structural state violence to localized interpersonal violence (Bourgois 2001). The everyday violence of ‘neoliberal peacetimes’ (Bourgois 2001) in Brazilian urban communities can help us understand interpersonal violence as a complex matrix of meaning and practices that shape the very core of social relationships, both demobilizing and productive, disruptive and unifying (Auyero and Kilanski 2015). In contexts in which the ‘law of conservation of violence’ (Bourgois 2001) is in place, the relationship between gendered self-conceptions and interpersonal violence can take unexpected shapes. Brazilian scholars discuss how the growing drug-related violence in urban outskirts since the 1980s is connected to the widening of a ‘crime-world sociability’ (Feltran 2010) through which conflict-solving techniques that once pertained to the illicit drug economy have come to inform other social relations. Feltran (2010) refers to the crime-world sociability as a discursive matrix that informs practices and meaning in Brazilian urban outskirts. Furthermore, police brutality and racial profiling lead to a ‘criminal subjection’ (Misse 2010) through which stigmatized youth embody criminal dispositions in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Distrust for police and other institutions also leads to informal mechanisms of social control, since it is implausible for working-class and sub-proletarian populations living in urban outskirts to go to the police for protection (Fonseca 2004: 97) Culturally hegemonic gender prescriptions in contemporary Brazil resemble Connell’s concept of emphasized femininity (Connell 2014). According to this concept, femininity is defined and organized around the sexual availability of young women and the domestic and maternal labour of older women. Indeed, both sexuality and motherhood are sources of status and recognition among Brazilian women, especially those who face economic insecurity. For girls excluded from most spheres of social recognition, sex has crucial exchange value but rarely is valuable enough to warrant men’s lasting affections (Souza and Grillo 2009). Most working-class households in Brazil are led by single mothers, who provide for their children and extended family (IBGE 2014). In a patriarchy without men, local femininity has its particularities. Mothers are saint-like. Loyalty and family honour are highly valued, and women especially are measured by their devotion to their family and partners (Fonseca 2004). In Rio de Janeiro, e.g. young men refer to their main girlfriend as a fiel, ‘the faithful’ (Pinho 2007), meaning not only sexual fidelity but overall loyalty. In this context, passivity is not always demanded of women; rather, war-like loyalty is expected. Not coincidently, the highest praise to a working-class woman is to be defined as a guerreira—a warrior (see Garcia et al. 2010). These structured gendered schemas of representation inform how women make sense of themselves and their practices. But how these notions of femininity—sexuality, motherhood, family duty and loyalty—intersect with understandings about the (i)legitimate use of lethal violence is yet to be investigated. Collecting Criminalized Girls’ Narratives Empirical data for this paper was collected at a youth detention centre in Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state. The centre houses up to 45 girls at a time. Girls have weekly meetings in which they discuss their concerns with the centre’s staff. During one of those meetings, I was introduced as a researcher and invited girls to participate in the study. I informed them that I was researching criminalized girls and that I was interested in listening to their life stories. Those who desired to participate gave their names to members of the staff, who produced a list of potential interviewees. In the following month, I visited the detention centre daily and waited for girls who were on the list to become available for interviews. The interviews took place in private administrative rooms. They were recorded with the consent of the interviewees and the detention centre’s staff and ethics board. In total, I collected 21 personal narratives of incarcerated young women, ranging from 13- to 18-years old. Interviews were conducted following Presser’s (2010) suggestions for collecting narratives of criminalized individuals, with vague probes and minimal intervention: ‘the story-seeking interviewer does best by listening much more than talking, by tolerating silence, and by asking open-ended questions’ (Presser 2010: 437). Since the language respondents choose to talk about their experiences would be the ‘data for understanding constructions of self and world’ (Presser 2010: 437), I avoided as much as possible to provide the respondents with words to construct their narrative. Presser’s observation that criminalized individuals often initiate interviews with a retelling of the act that led to their incarceration, even without being asked to, was proven true for my sample. Most girls were eager to talk about their experiences and started the conversation with a narration of their crime. When they did not initiate the narrative themselves, I prompted them with the question ‘so, how did you get here?’ (Presser 2010: 346). As their narratives progressed, I followed up with generic prompts, such as: ‘Can you tell me more about that?’, ‘and then what happened?’, ‘and how did that make you feel?’ and ‘why do you think that happened the way it did?’. Given that I had an interest in their life story as well, I prompted them to reflect on these events in light of their childhood experiences. While that might not come spontaneously to older interviewees (Presser 2010), the girls’ young age allowed them to draw from their childhood more easily. When they did not, I prompted them with questions, such as ‘was this always the case?’ or ‘were things in your home always like that?’. The respondents in this study were imprisoned for violent offences, such as robbery, kidnapping, robbery-murder, attempted homicide and homicide. Two-thirds of them were white, and one-third was Black.1 Over half of the respondents reported cohabitation with a partner, a third have children and the majority reported having experienced or witnessed domestic violence. Almost half reported involvement in the illicit drug economy. Most respondents came from families led by women. The vast majority of these families can be classified as members of the precariat (Braga 2013; Standing 2016): underpaid labourers subjected to high levels of employment instability within the new service economy, which bloomed in Brazil in the 1990s. Respondents’ female guardians were domestic workers, caregivers, low-skilled office managers and cooks. Male guardians were often manual labourers on seasonal contracts, working in construction or farming. Occasionally, girls mentioned their family’s dependence on welfare benefits. Resource, Failure, Dilemma: Making Sense of Gender and Violence While I interviewed a total of 21 girls, in this paper, I focus on the narratives of the 13 girls who engaged in acts of lethal violence, i.e. those who committed or attempted homicides or robbery-murders. With this choice, I hope to understand the specific ways in which girls make sense of this form of violence, given the lack of research on the topic and the possible contradictions that the use of lethal violence might impose on girls’ self-conceptions of femininity. The other respondents were incarcerated for acts of robbery, which did not involve serious violence, and, therefore, for the purpose of this paper, did not have their stories analyzed. Narratives were analyzed holistically. Following Presser, I ask: ‘What is the logic or plot that is being developed?’ (Presser 2010: 444). I also look for moments in which girls include or exclude themselves from the action being described, as for ‘deflecting of passivizing structures, arrangements of words that shift the focus from the speaker’s agentive act’ (Presser 2010: 440) and for justifications—‘phrases that interject, before the action, a structure that makes the criminal act seem appropriate or necessary’ (Presser 2010: 440). Girls provided different motivations and made sense of their violence in diverse ways. Some were able to present a redemptive narrative, and some were not. I found three different frames for violence in respondents’ narratives, each one conveying a different relationship between the narrators’ self-conception of femininity and the appropriate use of lethal violence, i.e. a different ‘order of things’ regarding gender and violence. Girls whose stories focus on the illicit drug economy and on family duty construct narratives in which violence is presented as a gendered resource, portraying violence as an embodied strategy to achieve femininity. Girls whose narratives focus on self-defence and non-consensual acts of killing produced narratives marked by ‘self-despair’, in which violence is understood as a gendered failure. Lastly, girls whose stories focus on violently enforced monogamy present a cleft narrative, in which violence is understood as a gendered dilemma. Violence as a gendered resource: achieving femininity through violence These girls’ stories share a similar narrative structure. Albeit in different contexts—some within the illicit drug economy and some in family affairs—these girls produce personal narratives in which their gendered self-conception is not threatened by their use of violence but rather reinforced by it. They are able to tell morally coherent tales in which they take responsibility for their actions but do not feel the need to display regret or guilt. In these stories, violence is employed as a resource that reasserts the narrator’s identity as a woman—a self-controlled manager in the case of drug dealers and a dutiful and loyal daughter in the cases of Ana and Paula. Responsible managers: responsibility and self-control in the illicit drug economy Gabriela, 18, was incarcerated for the homicide of her boss, the local male leader of her drug-selling group. She and other drug dealers organized the attack because he was unfair and overly violent towards his subordinates. Gabriela was a manager for the group, a position of relative authority. She dealt with the finances and logistics of her boca (a drug-selling spot). Involved in the illicit drug economy since she was 13, Gabriela is cool-headed and speaks matter-of-factly. She joined the drug ring after working for two years with her mother in a small factory. The money wasn’t good. Look at how much things cost at the supermarket, she tells me. You can’t buy anything with that kind of money. In her story, there is no space for emotion or contradiction; hers is a tale of meticulously thought-out events from early youth. She narrates the homicide, which occurred after she and her peers successfully kidnapped the victim: In the most important moment, the boys chickened out. They didn’t want to get the guy out of the trunk, put him on the ground and kill him. They chickened out and just shot him in the arm. I told them: ‘I can’t believe this is happening. We have to kill him, not hurt him’. Then I took the gun and shot him twice in the face. This tale comprises all major elements of Gabriela’s narrative: she is responsible and takes control over situations when her male counterparts fail. In her story, women are self-possessed and trustworthy. She tells me the bosses—always men—value women workers because they can trust them with money and drugs: We calculate everything. Boys always make a mess. Gabriela is not alone when she highlights girls’ sense of responsibility in the violent drug trade. In my sample, girls in high-ranking positions in the illicit drug economy consistently opposed their self-possessed personalities against boys’ emotional responses to violence, be it cowardice or cruelty. Samantha, 14, was also a manager for a drug ring known for its violent tactics. She is incarcerated for shooting at a police officer when he broke in her boca (he was not harmed, but she was convicted of attempted homicide nonetheless). She agrees that girls are valued workers due to their self-control. Boys are often too cruel. This is illustrated in the way she refuted a ‘favour’ offered by her male peers while she was detained: to kill the entire family of the girl who tipped off the police about her boca’s location. But there was no need for all that, she told them, sounding sensible and paternalistic, like one reasoning with a child. Likewise, Tina, 18, incarcerated for kidnapping, jokingly wondered if her husband—a leader of a powerful drug ring—had ‘psychological problems’ due to his pleasure in killing. Like Samantha and Gabriela, Tina held a managerial position in her organization and employed violence when necessary to achieve the goals of her enterprise but not ‘excessively’. In the context of a violent drug economy, femininity is associated with responsibility and self-control. Occasional acts of violence committed by the girls in the exercise of their labour within the drug economy are not seen as opposed to their gendered self-perceptions. There is no room for regret or contradiction in these tales, as girls present themselves as proper managers whose actions are thought out and always called for. Through ‘reasonable’ acts of violence, they perform a femininity that is highly valued in their social context: one that takes control of the situation when men are lost in cruel games. In their narratives, violence is framed as a gendered resource, employed to produce a self-controlled and responsible feminine identity valued in the illicit drug economy. Avenging daughters: violence as a righteous act of care Ana, 16, was incarcerated for participating in the homicide of her father, alongside her husband and her mother. Her father was abusive towards her mother and her half-sister. Although her parents were no longer married, he would occasionally come by their home to ‘make a mess’. At the time of the interview, Ana was nine months pregnant with her second child. She is shy, and words do not come easily to her. Still, she recounts her story with a sense of quiet self-righteousness: I was getting angrier and angrier with him. Then one day, my mom told me he was threatening her. Then I said… that was it. I was no longer going to accept that in my house. She then planned the homicide with her family. Her mother drugged him, and Ana’s husband stabbed him. Ana’s job was to clean the room afterwards. She says the homicide was their last option. They tried to go to the police, but her father had family in the force. Then one day… I couldn’t take it anymore. It was my mother or him. Easy choice. A young mother and wife, Ana recounts her participation in the killing as a reclaiming of control over the domestic realm—which she refers to as her house (despite it being her mother’s). She frames her violence as an act of care. Sacrifice and duty are common themes in her story: I’d rather he abused me than my mother. She tells me her family and her community are ‘on her side’ because they know she did the right thing for her family. Sacrifice and family loyalty are also present in Paula’s story. Paula, 14, killed a girl from her community. Paula’s story is a supernatural tale of fate and revenge. She had ‘nothing against’ the victim but when they were standing next to a cliff, something ‘overcame her’ and she pushed the girl over the edge. Later, she found out that the victim’s father had killed her father years ago. Who would have thought that I, without knowing, would be avenging my late father?, she said with dramatic wonder. Both tales convey themes of dramatic sacrifice in the name of family. Ana and Paula’s gendered identities—Ana as a young mother and wife and Paula as a vengeful daughter—are sustained through righteous acts of care. Vengeful acts of violence are reconciled with the narrators’ self-perceptions of femininity through narratives in which violence is framed as a selfless act of loyalty and, thus, mobilized as a strategy to improve the narrators’ identities as good daughters. Violence as a gendered failure: self-despair in survival crimes Girls who recount being forced to commit violence or doing it as self-defence construct narratives that frame violence as a gendered failure. These stories pose a paradox. They are the ones that most resemble what feminist criminology calls ‘survival crimes’ (Chesney-Lind 2006), crimes committed as a response to abuse and/or after cumulated victimization. One could expect these narrators to be able to justify their actions, draw from ‘victim narratives’ and avoid responsibilization (see Katz 1990; Guo 2012). And yet, these are the stories in which narrators struggle the most to reconcile their self-conceptions of femininity with violence. Girls in this group feel guilty for ‘putting themselves’ in the situation for which they were criminalized. In their stories, they list their failures as wives, girlfriends, daughters and mothers and establish a connection between these faults and the violence they were forced to commit. Thus, they construct a narrative rooted in ‘self-despair’ (Bourdieu 2000: 64), i.e. the inability of reconciling one’s habitus with one’s position in the social space—in the case of the narrative, with one’s subject position in the story as a murderer. This ‘discordance’ generates the feeling of being ‘displaced, out of place and ill at ease’ (Bourdieu 2000: 157). Here, narrators lack an appropriate frame to turn ‘necessity into a virtue’, i.e. to put a reasonable and redemptive spin on their stories. Not coincidentally, these are the stories more deeply filled with shame and sadness. Runaway wives: domestic redemption for non-consensual killings Five girls in the sample reported being forced to commit the violent acts for which they were imprisoned. Fatima, 16, was forced by an older man to attack a woman she did not know. She and a girlfriend took a ride with this man, who was their acquaintance. He pulled a gun on them and forced them to leave the car and stab a woman whom Fatima believes was a sex worker. She was traumatized by the event and did not remember the attack in detail. In her narrative, she reinforces her role as a stay-at-home wife and an obedient daughter in an attempt to distance herself from the killing. While she states that she was forced to attack the victim, she also blames herself. She takes a demure and childish tone when considering that she was to blame because she ‘ran away from home’ that day against her husband and her father’s wishes. Olivia, 18, was also traumatized by being forced into participating in a homicide. Olivia’s story resembles what Chesney-Lind (2006) has called ‘survival crimes’. She was sexually abused by her brother at 11 and, unable to confront her family about it, ran away from home. She ended up marrying an older man for protection. Her husband became a drug dealer and was incarcerated when she was 14. Olivia was left alone with her husband’s son from his previous relationship, whom she unofficially adopted. Sheepishly, she says she met a wealthy elderly man and became his companion in exchange for money so that she could provide for her stepson. Her husband’s fellow drug dealers heard of her new relationship and threatened to tell him the truth if she did not help to plan a robbery against her new partner. She feared her husband would have her killed if he knew of her arrangement, so she agreed under the condition that they would not harm the victim. But during the robbery, they killed him nonetheless. Shame runs through Olivia’s story, from how she talks about her sexual abuse to her resorting to sex work; culminating in her participation in the homicide of her new partner. All the while, she produces a narrative of sexualized self-blame. Similarly, she presents a gendered redemption arc in which she is healed through virginal motherhood (her son was given to her as ‘a gift from God’) and a reconciliation with her sexually abusive brother: I see a bright future for us three, me, my son, and my brother. Olivia and Fatima recount a story in which their gender identity is tainted by the violence in which they were forced to participate. They share a narrative habitus that frames violence as a gendered failure, a pathology that must be cured by adhering to and overplaying traditional scripts of motherhood and wifehood. In these stories, notions of femininity and violence cannot be reconciled in a way that frames their violent acts as justified and morally coherent. Unworthy: guilt in self-defence narratives Two girls in the sample committed violence in acts described by them as self-defence. Luisa, 15, shot her cousin when he attacked her with a knife. He was struggling with addiction and was intoxicated when it happened. His ghost haunts her in her room at the detention centre, asking why she did that to him. I tell him I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t believe it could be true… This is a wound that will never heal. Her narrative is filled with guilt. She lists all the times she failed to be a ‘good girl’ and failed her loved ones: when she could not protect herself and her little sister from a rapist when they were, respectively, 8- and 10-years old; when she was arrested the first time, for lending a gun to a friend, which led her mother into depression and made her lose custody of the children; when she got involved in robberies, which is the reason she had a gun when her cousin attacked her, being, thus, the reason he died. I used to be a good girl, all I did was care for my siblings, she considers. But then I got mixed with the wrong crowd, and horrible things happened. Sandra, 17, also attacked a family member. She stabbed her older brother when he attacked her during a heated argument, but he survived (for which she is thankful). She was living in an orphanage with her siblings after Social Services found out she was sexually abused by her stepfather. Sandra blames herself for the attack against her brother and for other tragedies that fell upon her family. She takes blame especially by her inability to regain custody of her daughter (she was put up for adoption because the orphanage’s staff deemed Sandra unfit to be a mother) and to get her siblings out of the foster care system. Like Luisa, she hears voices that blame her for what happened. Luisa and Sandra share a common narrative. Striking in both tales is the fact that they cannot find a way to tell a redemptive and morally coherent tale despite their history of extreme poverty and child abuse and their tales of self-defence against older male aggressors. Their narratives follow the script of a ‘survival crime’, but the girls do not see themselves as worthy of survival. In their narratives, violence is framed as a gendered failure from which there is no redemption, the ultimate misfortune on top of other gendered failures as daughters, mothers and sisters. Violence as a gendered dilemma: contradiction in tales of violently enforced monogamy Girls in this group mobilize contradictory understandings of femininity and violence to construct their personal narratives and to make sense of their violent acts. Both respondents murdered other young women in hopes to maintain the stability of their heterosexual relationships. While they are able to make sense of this violence from the subject position of a wife or girlfriend, the act also threatens their self-conceptions of ‘mother’ and ‘good girl’. As such, the act of violence is framed in both stories as a gendered dilemma that cannot be easily reconciled with conflicting self-conceptions of femininity. They construct a ‘cleft’ (Bourdieu 2000: 64) narrative constrained by a double bind, a ‘tormented habitus bearing in the form of tensions […] the mark of the contradictory conditions formation of which they are the product’ (Bourdieu 2000: 64). This is an experience of unresolved contradiction; a lack of fit between one’s own self-conceptions and the cultural expectations of one’s surroundings. Three girls in the sample killed other girls due to conflicts involving their romantic relationships with men. Helena, 16, killed a 12-year-old girl from her neighbourhood because she had an affair with her husband. Helena portrays herself as an aggressive and invulnerable person who refuses victimization. She compares herself to her mother, who was abused by men, and prophesizes that she ‘will never be abused by a man’. Hoping to escape a violent household, Helena left home at 11 to live with her boyfriend. They had a child but lost custody of the baby to Helena’s mother. This was a ‘turning point’ in Helena’s life, making her more aggressive and distrustful of others. Rumours surfaced in the neighbourhood that Helena’s husband was having an affair with a 12-year-old girl. They were acquaintances, so Helena invited her to talk in a road near their neighbourhood at the edge of a cliff. There, the girl confessed the affair and Helena, with the help of her friend Paula, attacked her. Helena recounts the murder in energetic detail, talking about blood and broken bones. But Helena’s identity as a mother comes back at this point of the narrative and interrupts the action. While pushing the girls’ body off the cliff, she saw her son in the girl’s face. This made her cease the aggression on sight: I backed off, saying no, Paula, no. Days later, Helena and Paula were arrested and shown photos of the body. Helena was shocked by the damage she had caused: I couldn’t believe I had done that. It could have been my son in her place. Helena’s subject positions as a vengeful wife and a good mother cannot narratively coexist. This tension produces a narrative with contradictory emotions and rationalities—the pride of the act of killing and the motherly remorse of the aftermath. Juliana, 15, also killed an acquaintance who had an affair with her boyfriend. Juliana’s relationship with the men in question was transformative to her. She mentions how her former boyfriends were all drug dealers who treated her badly, while her new boyfriend was a good, hard-working guy who made her ‘want to stay at home away from trouble’. But a 14-year-old girl from their neighbourhood was threatening their relationship: she was hitting on him and intimidating Juliana. After exchanging threats, Juliana and the victim met for a ‘talk’ that escalated into a fight. Juliana was armed with a boxcutter and stabbed her. Throughout her narrative, Juliana simultaneously justifies her act—construing her victim as promiscuous and untrustworthy and her romantic relationship as something worth defending to the last consequences—and diminishes her agency in the events. Yet, she also recounts in detail her past ‘thug life’, vida bandida, which she led with her ex-boyfriends involved in the drug trade. This belligerent, street-smart persona comes forth in the story when Juliana, usually soft-spoken, acts as herself in the past and enunciates her voice in a defiant and aggressive tone. Despite her occasional ‘gangster’ performance, she refuses the label of ‘murderer’. At the end of her narrative, she recounts an interaction with a nurse at the detention centre in which the nurse was shocked to find out about her crime. I said: ‘Aunty, I think you’ve already realized I am not what people are saying I am’. She said I was ‘the girl with the pretty smile’. People who know me know I’m not a murderer. At the centre of Helena’s and Juliana’s narratives is the killing of a girl in order to defend their respectable social statuses as wife and girlfriend. These are not solely romantic relationships but connections with highly ‘valuable’ men, whose respectability is expected to ‘rub on’ the girls’ identity and save them from their past (in Helena’s case, her history of child abuse; in Juliana’s, from the ‘criminality’ of her past boyfriends, which had ‘contaminated’ her). The defence of their status as girlfriends, however, does not come without its gendered dilemmas. ‘Girlfriend’ or ‘wife’ is not the only role they play in their social context. Helena can coherently make sense of her violent act while she is in the position of a vengeful wife, but her role as a mother is incoherent with the same action. When an identity shift happens, Helena halts. But it is too late, and it is as a mother, not a wife, that she mourns. Juliana, on the other hand, tries to cut ties with her past ‘thug identity’. She challenges the ‘murderer’ label by reclaiming a good girl identity, ‘sweet’ and with a ‘pretty smile’, as the unsuspecting nurse described her. She, too, lives a gendered dilemma. While on the streets, defending her respectability as a girlfriend, she takes on an aggressive demeanour that seems coherent with her social context. She recognizes, however, the need to let go of this street identity and embrace a ‘sweet girl’ persona to escape the label of ‘murderer’. Gender, Sacrifice, Violence, and the ‘Art of Making Do’ This paper aimed at understanding how criminalized teenage girls narratively reconcile—or not—their self-conceptions of femininity with violent practices. I found that girls’ narratives have three different frames for violence, depending on the context and motivation they attribute to the act of killing (see Table 1). Some framed violence as a gendered resource, some as a gendered failure and some as a gendered dilemma. Table 1. Summary of findings Frame . Context . Resource Drug economy Family duty Failure Forced killings Self-defence Dilemma Heterosexual relationships Frame . Context . Resource Drug economy Family duty Failure Forced killings Self-defence Dilemma Heterosexual relationships Open in new tab Table 1. Summary of findings Frame . Context . Resource Drug economy Family duty Failure Forced killings Self-defence Dilemma Heterosexual relationships Frame . Context . Resource Drug economy Family duty Failure Forced killings Self-defence Dilemma Heterosexual relationships Open in new tab But what is the organizing principle of these different narratives? What ‘order of things’ regarding gender and violence is being conveyed through these narratives? In other others, what is the narrative habitus shared by all respondents? An investigation of what constitutes the habitus ‘should be concerned with understanding how the social order collects, channels, reinforces or counteracts psychological processes depending on whether there is a homology, redundancy, and reinforcement between the two systems or, to the contrary, contradiction and tension’ (Bourdieu 1999: 512). Likewise, in Bourdieusian narrative analysis, we ought to ask whether the narrative habitus of the respondents derives from a homology between habitus and structure. This homology, in the case of these stories, is the appropriate fit between the meaning of the narrators’ violent actions and their beliefs about femininity. Does violence reinforce or contradict one’s femininity in these stories? As we have seen, it does both, and often simultaneously. Violence is both framed as strategy and failure, accomplishment and pathology and necessity and fault. The practice of violence can make or break the girls’ sense of femininity and self-worth. The key organizing principle in these narratives is girls’ relationship to others and their perceived selflessness or selfishness. In other words, the legitimate relationship between femininity and violence is established based on whether girls’ violence is not selfish and self-promoting but is instead oriented towards others. This is the case of family protection in Ana’s story (and the failure to protect in the case of Luisa), motherhood in Helena’ story and even the managerial and leadership work of Gabriela. Violence was framed as a resource and, thus, redeemable and justified when done for someone else’s sake. When girls looked after themselves, in cases of self-defence and forced killings, they could not justify their violence and had to overplay traditional scripts of femininity. Those who lacked access to traditional feminine statuses of wife and mother were left to be haunted by their actions. Therefore, respondents share a narrative habitus about femininity and violence that constrains their ability to make sense of their actions. They must do so under the premise that violence is only justifiable when done in a sacrificial and/or selflessness manner. The space of possibilities for reconciliation with their gendered selves is bounded by notions of loyalty and sacrifice. This paper contributes to a growing feminist narrative criminology that investigates how personal narratives of violence are embedded in gendered social structures. Fleetwood (2016) and Miller et al. (2015) found that criminalized women make sense of their practices—respectively, being a drug mule and using methamphetamines—through care, describing their crimes as attempts to be better mother and wives. This research found that the framework of care—here interpreted as an orientation towards the other—also applies to young women who engaged in serious acts of violence. Furthermore, ‘caring’ is not only employed to justify criminalized behaviour, but it is the organizing principle of most stories, including those in which there was a failure to care. Girls whose narratives were embedded in self-despair connected their violence to a series of ‘failures’ as mother, daughters and sisters. Even more surprising is the lack of victimization narratives. Victimization is a common theme in narrative criminology. Sandberg (2009) found that criminalized Danish men drew from both ‘gangster’ and ‘oppression’ discourses to make sense of their crimes. Similarly, Miller et al. (2015) argue that victimization narratives might be more easily available to women due to gendered expectations. But while girls in my sample did talk about suffering and oppression, they did not mobilize their victimization as a ‘technique of neutralization’ (Sykes and Matza 1957), i.e. as a way to avoid responsibility. The common narrative criminology trope—‘I am a victim; therefore it is not entirely my fault’—is turned upside down here: I am a victim, therefore it is entirely my fault. Girls’ victimization led to self-blame, not absolution. Violence is only justified if it is sacrificial or selfless. Selfishness, even in the form of self-preservation, can only produce cleft and self-despairing narrative habitus. This calls attention to the gendered dimensions of people’s ability to justify and absolve themselves of their criminalized practices. These findings suggest that narrative criminology would benefit from a stronger focus on the gendered dimension of guilt, self-blame and responsibilization rhetoric. In addition, I found that teenage girls’ narratives of violence are not based on localized cultural values or on ‘street capital’ or ‘street talk’ (Sandberg and Pedersen 2011; Sandberg and Fleetwood 2017). Girls involved in drug trafficking might be an exception. They share a particular conception of femininity, one associated with responsibility and self-control. Further research is required to investigate whether the Brazilian illicit drug economy can be considered a social field with particular capitals and habitus attributed to women. Overall, however, girls told stories that could be considered traditionally gendered: tales of fallen or righteous daughters, wives and mothers, whose morality is bounded by selflessness and loyalty. Violence is thus embedded in a larger array of practices and beliefs that Wacquant calls women’s ‘art of making do’: the ‘managing of the household economy and the web of kinship and friendship relations that constitute critical resources in strategies of daily survival’ (Wacquant 1998: 10; see also Scheper-Hughes 1993). These findings reinforce Miller et al.’ call for a conceptualization of narrative as the ‘scaffolding of social structure’ (Miller et al. 2015: 71). While personal narratives have been seen by some criminologists as a site of creativity and strategy (Fleetwood 2016), this research calls attention to how deeply narratives of lethal violence are constrained by dominant gendered perceptions, i.e. how strongly they are informed by symbolic violence. This is not to say, as some of Bourdieu’s critics would argue (see Boltanski and Thévenot 1999), that these girls are not able to think critically about their gendered identities but rather that their capacity for reflexivity is informed by social structures. Future research will be strengthened by assessing whether accounts collected in different sites produce multiple and contradictory narrative strategies, illuminating how stories change to fit particular institutional settings (Presser and Sandberg 2015). In this case, narrative criminologists might benefit from a more flexible theory of social dispositions, like the one proposed by Lahire (2011). A Bourdieusian framework allows narrative criminologists to emphasize the dialectic relationship between subjective lived experiences and objective social structures. Girls interviewed in this study embodied and reproduced a particular form of knowledge about gender identity, self-sacrifice and loyalty that informed the content, form and emotional landscape of their storytelling. Respondents who lacked the correct framing for their violent practices not only could not produce an intelligible narrative but suffered from the tensions and contradictions in their stories. In their narrative habitus, femininity is a lived experience that one can only survive through self-sacrifice. Femininity and violence coexist as long as they follow the order of things that states that women must prioritize caring for others over protecting themselves. Funding This work by funded by a fellowship granted by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior between 2015 and 2016. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Candace Kruttschnitt, Josée Johnston, Ron Levi, Phil Goodman, Jerry Flores, Jennifer Fleetwood, Eva Alterman Blay, Maria Helena Augusto, Márcia Lima, Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, and Hermílio Santos for their comments and mentorship. Footnotes 1 Black girls were overrepresented in the youth detention centre as Black Brazilians make up less than 20 per cent of Rio Grande do Sul’s population (IBGE 2010). References Adkins , L. and Beverley , S . ( 2005 ), Feminism After Bourdieu . Blackwell Publishing . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ajzenstadt , M . ( 2009 ), ‘The Relative Autonomy of Women Offenders’ Decision Making’ , Theoretical Criminology , 13 , 201 – 25 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Anderson , E . ( 1994 ), ‘The Code of the Streets’ , The Atlantic , 273 , 80 – 94 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Auyero , J. and Kilanski , K . 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TI - ‘I Did What I Had to Do’: Loyalty and Sacrifice in Girls’ Narratives of Homicide in Southern Brazil
JF - The British Journal of Criminology
DO - 10.1093/bjc/azz079
DA - 2020-04-04
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/i-did-what-i-had-to-do-loyalty-and-sacrifice-in-girls-narratives-of-7UKaMSYsDc
DP - DeepDyve
ER -