Como juízas mulheres julgam mulheres pelo tráfico de drogas: discursos criminológicos reforçando privilégios e silenciamentos na cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

Abstract

In this work, we explore daily practices of the judiciary and discourses, parting from the investigation of gender issues involved in the process of criminalization of women, in principle, drug retailers, by female judges. We first bring up the debate on drug policy in Brazil, and especially in Rio de Janeiro, where violence and brutality inherent to armed combat assume the role of a police state in which certain people and certain substances are seen as if they were true entities. We also seek to understand how the processes of feminization of poverty are related to these problems, investigating how the first prohibitionist legislation in the country can be seen as an indication of its racist, classist, and, increasingly, patriarchal side views in the region. Secondly, we approach the deconstruction of law and particularly criminal law, understanding them as correlated to strategies of force that are especially functional for the exercise of the punishment power and which their language and supposedly neutral and sublimated senses tend to overshadow. At this point, experiences in audiences and interviews revealed to us how power relations are established in meshes and how they are responsible for the coloniality that generates hierarchizations, which led us to the third phase of the research. In it, we relate the coloniality of power and being, especially with the constructs of race and privileges involved in our questions, perceiving how racism is an anchor of the selectivity of the penal system and how it is in constant interaction with the whiteness that crosses the judiciary, configurating a state of domination. In the end, we seek to focus on gender studies, taking the paths of feminism, especially the ones since the diaspora and the decolonial ones, as tools that help us to perceive that the experiences of the women we deal with in the fieldwork, magistrates and criminalized women, are imbricated to the systems that reproduce subalternizations and differentiations, which still continue to be reproduced in contemporary coloniality. These theoretical formulations were developed contingent upon our experiences in the fieldwork, when speeches produced in hearings, trials and interviews gave the tone of the research developed.