‘I Did What I Had to Do': loyalty and Sacrifice in Girls' Narratives of Homicide in Southern Brazil

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Otto, Natália (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2020
In: The British journal of criminology
Year: 2020, Volume: 60, Issue: 3, Pages: 703-721
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
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Keywords:
Narrative criminology
Youth justice
Gender
Violence
Latin America
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azz079