Chapter 5: the cultural Other: migrants, refugees and victims of gender violence
p. 143-166
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1Dalva walked firmly from the back of the auditorium, where minutes before she had listened to the talks of the other speakers with arms crossed over her lap. She stood before the audience and held the microphone firmly against her chest. More than 40 woman and children were seated before her. The noise of voices talking over other voices and of children shouting and crying dominated the room, preventing Dalva’s presence from being noted. She stood before women from various countries. On that day, however, they had come from Cidade Antônio Estevão de Carvalho, a neighborhood in the district of Itaquera, in the eastern zone of the city of São Paulo, which had become the residence for countless Congolese and Angolans who had requested refugee status from the Brazilian government in the past decade. The children they tried to control were present because it was Saturday and there was no school or daycare. Considering the importance of the event, in which they all learned about Brazil’s Maria da Penha Law concerning domestic and family violence, they got on a bus in the early afternoon, which took them to a regional building of the city government in Sé, at the center of the city of São Paulo. After a deep breath, Dalva raised her voice very loudly, nearly shouting: “Good afternoon, I am Dalva, political coordinator for women”. There was no reaction. “What I have to say to you here today is that you are not alone. I had also been in an abusive relationship”. The shouts that filled the room became curious murmurs. Dalva got the attention of the unruly audience.
2She spoke of her own life. She said that she had come from a family of “immigrants”, like those who were listening to her story. She said that her grandmother “came barefoot from Italy to Brazil” and that she herself had burned her hand that morning making pasta, her favorite meal. She admitted that she got married very young, that her children were the fruit of this marriage and that she realized, after 15 years of marriage, that her relationship was abusive: “When I became aware of my situation, I got divorced”. She then explained how she struggled to get an education to have a successful career, “despite all the difficulties”, balancing studies, work, and caring for the children. Having overcome so many adversities, Dalva stood before those women in a position of giving witness not only to suffering, but to overcoming. If she could tell her story, if she could work for women, it was because she did not keep quiet, it was because she was a survivor of an abusive relationship, she was able to leave that situation. “Poor thing”, Chara whispered quietly in my ear. Seated in a chair to my right, the Ethiopian was holding the six-month old baby of her Congolese neighbor, Jana. Chara pitied Dalva, she felt sorry for her.
3This article addresses practices to administer emotions in the activities of a project to raise awareness about gender violence, implemented through the localization of its beneficiaries among subjects who are victims of “violence”, “tradition” or “vulnerability”. I describe, in the following pages, some of the techniques of subjectivation and sensibilization used in contacts between agents of the government and migrants and refugees whose lives these agents want to affect. The project actions are inscribed in technologies implied in the emotional production of frontiers (Olivar 2019). I analyze the effects of these practices on the territorialization of violence, cultural attribution, and affective pedagogy, which are deeply involved in contemporary liberal projects that dialog intimately with notions dear to some sectors of feminisms.
Producing the victim
4The objective of the encounter in which Dalva made public her history of violence was to instruct “women migrants and refugees” about the Maria da Penha Law, Brazilian legislation designed to prevent and punish domestic and family violence against women. It marked the closing of a project held in the city of São Paulo between the years of 2017 and 2018, which was executed by international agencies in partnerships with the Municipal Secretariat of Human Rights. The objective was to work to prevent and combat situations of “gender violence” among the beneficiaries, by holding seminars and discussion circles that encourage women to speak and at which it is supposed that statements about harm can emerge.
5A significant portion of the public to which Dalva aimed her talk were women whose transits and subjectivities orbited around categories of refugee applicants and or refugees. The refugee, as a category of framing, presupposes a demand related to recognition of violence perpetrated by a state and or in which the state is negligent or incapable of protecting its citizens from situations of persecution and violence. Refugees are, according to the legal-administrative regulations of the mobilities, those who obtained recognition of a “well-founded fear of persecution” by the part of the destination state or in Brazilian law, recognition that the territory in which they reside or of their nationality presented a situation of “generalized violation of human rights” (Brasil 1997). Refugee applicants are those who are still requesting this recognition, while the category of migrant is related, from the perspective of the institutional agents, to other motivations, such as economic need, “to improve life” or “enjoy life” (Togni 2014). Aimed at migrants and refugees, the project, however, did not distinguish these categories. In general, the participants came from other countries “of the south”, that is, from places frequently produced as nations of emigration and expulsion of co-nationals.
6The project’s conversation circles were coordinated by eight migrants and refugees, given the title of “cultural mediators” and who received 600 reais per month so that they could organize workshops in each one of the four “focal points” in which their actions took place. The encounters were conducted both at the center of the city and in what was understood as “territories” of the “cultural mediators”, that is, in neighborhoods and locations of the periphery of São Paulo. The presumption was that the “mediation” of women who had a supposed “cultural” and affective proximity with migrants and refugees, would allow testimonies to emerge with greater facility.1
7There is extensive literature in anthropology whose object is work conducted by emotions in contexts of suffering and violence, as well as their articulation with the contemporary production of the figure of the victim. Studies like those by Maria Claudia Coelho (2010) and Coelho and Rezende (2011) propose a fertile dialog with the notion of “micropolitics of emotions” coined by Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (1990). Lutz and Abu-Lughod affirm that discourses about emotions are also practices that give structure to that which is spoken about. This perspective allows the focus of the analysis to fall on articulations between emotions and power relations, on their reinforcement or on the reorganization of social hierarchies. The notion that emotions are configured in emotional grammars, as affirmed by Coelho and Pardo (2018), emphasize their relational character and how they are actualized in interactions.
8The articulation between emotional grammars and processes of conformation of the category of victim have also performed a central role in the reflections of Cynthia Sarti (2011), who analyzed the place of victims in the moral legitimation of social demands and their role in the public recognition of suffering. Sarti reflects on the crossing between victimization and the production of subjectivities, identifying the figure of the victim related to the notion of “rights”. From this perspective, the victim is presented as “a socially intelligible form of expressing the suffering associated to violence, legitimating social demands and actions for reparation and care” (Sarti 2011: 56). Sarti also emphasizes the influence of feminist demands in the process of conformation of “victim of gender violence” a figure that orbits around the category of vulnerability and a construction that delimits the scope of attending to their needs and of specific policies.
9With her emotional report in the packed auditorium, Dalva conquered the sensibilities of a difficult audience by presenting herself as something more than only a representative of a distant cause (Boltanski 2004). She produced the authenticity of her engagement by triggering an emotional grammar that placed her in the position of another victim of “gender violence”. This victim has a face and a voice, but does not exist beyond the technical narratives that establish equivalences and blur singularities, serving as a strategy to make the cause collective: “you are not alone”. The discourse of Dalva was aimed at potential victims, who, having been given tools for recognizing possible harm, would have to examine their relations to identify situations of abuse and to recognize their friends, neighbors, and themselves as a particular type of victim, and identify certain acts not only as conflict or violence, but as crimes (Debert e Gregori 2008).
10With her statement, Dalva sought an effect of identification based on a preventive pedagogy, so that the diffuse victim of gender violence does not become a victim in flesh and bones (Lowenkron 2015) or, in case a woman comes to identify or discover herself as this victim, that she should perform this in a way considered to be correct, by denouncing the aggressor. But, beyond being a victim, Dalva was also the institutional channel for this suffering. It was in the network of attendance to women victims of violence that the pain should seek comfort. Thus, Dalva was a subject of pain and suffering, and simultaneously, a representative of the institutional efforts to administer this pain.
11In this aspect, her talk also operated a certain break from protocol. To speak about personal sufferings was not behavior expected of a state representative in institutional spaces. “The state” presented itself in Dalva’s performance as a vulnerable institution and one that could be a victim. In this sense, her performance challenged the view of the state as a fundamentally “male” entity, as discussed in various works (Brown 2006; Vianna e Farias 2011; Vianna e Lowenkron 2018). The state embodied by Dalva was that which women could count on not only to request protection, but also to trust with their personal problems. However, Dalva performed certain characteristics currently attributed to a victim that were produced in contrast to passivity and that made an effort to escape from this condition. Thus, she articulated the denouncement to a capacity for agency as a characteristic of femininity.
12I analyze Dalva’s performance in its pedagogical aspect, in the effort by institutional agents to teach not only what is “gender violence” but the proper forms of manifestation of suffering and of engagement for reparation. These pedagogies emphasize giving outlet to pain in institutional spaces, in the format of statements and public denunciations in the field of criminal justice, which, it can be noted, do not always have a broad acceptance among migrants and refugees. This is because the meanings of the state as a regulator of frontiers, relations and affects was being produced according to quite complex technologies, which became visible in the manifestations from the audience, at the end of Dalva’s talk.
13While all the women clapped, the Congolese woman Judith raised her hand and signaled impatiently towards Dalva: “The Maria da Penha Law places the husband in jail and then what happens? I am unemployed, it’s my husband who supports the house”. The Angolan Angelina also stood up, gaining courage to make her statement: “In our community its different. If a woman denounced her husband she will be ‘spoken poorly of’. I have no family in Brazil, what will I do?”.
14Judith’s and Angelina’s statements suggest, on a first level of analysis, that situations of institutional violence, violations of rights and the impossibility to access the labor market were obstacles to the realization of solutions for “gender violence”. Unemployment and the lack of opportunity for economic support since arriving in the country were some of the most frequent complaints of the refugees both at public events and in daily conversations. Judith’s and Angelina’s statements also mention distinct ruptures in affective-family relations. To not have a family in Brazil or to have a home exclusively supported by a husband are situations that reveal a sensation of harm or rupture in terms of emotional and material support. I observe that to not have family in Brazil, for the refugees, is a situation that is frequently related to financial impossibilities and those related to documentation, to processes of regulation and establishment that are manifest in the asymmetries raised in the regimes of global mobility (Glick Schiller e Salazar, 2013). These asymmetries are profoundly structured in gender technologies that mark the transits and relations that take place in daily life based on these permeations.
15But Angelina’s intervention, when she affirmed that “in our community” things were different, could be interpreted in several ways. The first, which is constantly reinforced in public events organized by the regimes of asylum, suggested that “community” indicated a type of “cultural” difference inscribed in nations where more “oppressive” and “traditional” gender relations predominate. In the presumption that the women came from places where daily life was more intensely marked not only by violence related to their political history and processes of national formation, but also in what refers to relations of affection and intimacy, which are supposedly brutal. With some frequency, these borders or confins (Serje 2011) are located in “Africa” or in African women, who are considered to be more “traditional” subjects and insufficiently socialized in “modern” forms of relating.
16Meanwhile the second effect that appears in Angelina’s reference to a “community” of which Dalva is not a part, is related to the demarcation of the frontiers of alterity in “peripheral” national territories, that is, in places inhabited by populations considered to be “insufficiently socialized” in the law and in state order (Das and Poole, 2004). They thus shape the internal confins (Serje 2011) of the nation, in which the state supposedly is not present: the neighborhood of Cidade A.E. Carvalho, in the city of São Paulo’s zona leste [east zone]. This is a demarcation that, by producing its internal alterities, seeks to position a certain “Brazil” within the nations and imaginations of liberty and modernity. A Brazil that was, in the speech of the staff of the municipal government and NGOs, downtown [centro] São Paulo, which was “the state”, which was the local municipal administration of Sé, which was the municipal employee and her white European inheritance, which, although she was a migrant “like you”, became aware of oppression and separated from her husband.
17The interventions by Judith and Angelina indicated, however, that the trust that Dalva sought based on her statement confronted frontiers of representation. Dalva, beyond being a woman and victim of gender violence, presented herself as a civil servant, a representative of a “state” that, in the daily life of the migrants and refugees, was a producer of institutional violence in the “territories” in which these women lived. This violence is aimed at populations that, although they had crossed frontiers, inhabited other borders: the “peripheries” of the city of São Paulo.
“There is only one universal truth”
18Shortly before Dalva spoke at the local municipal offices of Sé, a soft-spoken prosecutor questioned the distracted audience: “Can anyone here tell me what gender violence is?”. No one risked responding. She continued: “There is biological sex, but there are gender roles. Behaviors that are expected of a man and a woman”. She continued to speak about themes such as “feminicide” and “rape culture”. She explained that sexual violence can also take place within a home: “It is important to remember that sex with a husband without consent is rape”. While the prosecutor spoke about “gender roles” I looked at Chara’s eyes. Seated beside me, she rocked Jana’s baby in her arms and had an empty stare, fixed at some point on the chair in front of her. She was certainly thinking of something else. “Gender is the social construction of the male and female, I want you to remember this”, the prosecutor said. The baby slept in Chara’s arms and she returned to her wandering. She looked at me, smiled shyly and said quietly: “she fell asleep thank god”. After the prosecutor’s talk a video was shown in which then UN Secretary General António Guterres affirmed that “there is only one universal truth, that violence against women is intolerable”.
19I then remember the day that I met Chara, just a few weeks earlier. It was at another meeting of the same project, at an Evangelical church in Cidade A.E. Carvalho. Chara lived there with a friend, another Ethiopian woman, Jahzara. Jana lived in the same neighborhood, with her husband and children. That Saturday, our mission was to take two large baskets full of homemade doughnuts, fried by Jana’s husband and some orange soda to the church where the project meeting would be held. The food was purchased with the R$80 that Jana received from the project for this purpose, in her function as “cultural mediator”. I was walking to the church and speaking with Chara, balancing the doughnuts on her arms while she told me of her trajectory. Her tone was excited as she told me each detail of what she had been through. Chara spoke of her suffering like someone talking about the plot of a suspense movie.
20Chara left her family in Ethiopia and first went to Sudan, and then Lebanon, where, through the consulate of her country and a recruitment agency, quickly found work with a Lebanese family. She worked as a maid in Beirut for a bit over a month and then the employers invited her to go on vacation in Brazil. The year was 2015 and she was 27. Chara was apprehensive because she knew many Ethiopians who worked in Lebanon, but in Brazil she knew no one. When the employers alleged that it would be only three months of vacation, she agreed. She left for São Paulo with a tourist visa. When she arrived in the country, her employers took her passport and isolated her. After three months of the supposed vacation, Chara was fed up and wanted to go back to Lebanon. After one year, the situation was the same and her bosses finally admitted that they did not intend to return.
21Chara worked without a break, without contact with anyone and without speaking Portuguese. In this period, her only interaction was at a church that she went to weekly. She received R$100 a month and the employers said that the other R$500 of her salary would be sent to her family in Ethiopia. She said that the bosses’ son pushed her when she refused to clean the kitchen after the youth had a party. After the aggression, Chara locked herself in her room, refusing to get out, and called another Ethiopian, Jahzara, who she had never seen personally. Jahzara knew of the existence of the “other Ethiopian” in the city through the daughter of her employer. The girl studied in the same school as one of the children who Chara cared for.
22Jahzara, who was also at the project meeting, had passed through a very similar situation a few years earlier. Having left Ethiopia, she sought work in Lebanon, from where she was taken after a few weeks to São Paulo. The pretext was the same: to go on vacation, after which they would return to Lebanon. When her passport was taken Jahzara understood that the employers did not intend to return. After one month living in São Paulo, Jahzara needed to go to a pharmacy to buy some menstrual pads. She went out walking and got lost. Without knowing how to return, she sat down on the sidewalk and cried, and was helped by an old woman who sold coffee on the street. After passing through a shelter for migrants, Jahzara was able to get another job and decided to stay in Brazil, and saved money to send to her family.
23More than a year later, Jahzara encouraged Chara to follow her steps and leave the home of the Lebanese. Under shouting and threats, Chara fled with nothing. She left her documents, her clothes and salary. A few days later, the two returned to the house to get Chara’s bag and passport. They were able to get them after Jahzara threatened to report the case to the police. Chara then sought to reconstruct her life in a country about which she knew nothing and did not like. The two friends went to live together in the zona leste, where they rented a small house, at first with Jahzara’s income. In the neighborhood, they met Jana and began to participate in the project of the UN agencies. They said that they liked the activities on the weekends, when they could get out of the house a bit.
24Although she enthusiastically narrated this all to me in the church just moments before the meeting for the project began, Chara never told this story in any activity of the project. On the afternoon when we accompanied the talks of the institutional agents from the regional city administration in Sé, Chara listened and lamented deeply for Dalva. She felt pity for the victim of “gender violence”, although she did not identify with her. Until then Chara had never had a companion whose acts she identified as aggression. She did not want to denounce and did not see any possibility to denounce the abuses that she suffered and of which she was aware and called violence. She also thought that her suffering did not fit into the project’s proposals because in her view, what she suffered was not “gender violence”, considering that the relationship with the aggressor involved work and not affection. Chara also did not see any advantage in seeking legal or police reparations against the people who kept her in captivity and confiscated her passport, a “family of rich merchants”, in her words, and did not even know their last name.
25The “universal truth” of intolerance in the face of violence against women, of which the UN representative spoke, did not mean, in Chara’s trajectory, any access to recognition or reparation. In any case, Chara never claimed this space, a position of subject that she did not believe could bring her any practical advantage. The public recognition of Chara’s suffering, like any reparation, would necessarily pass through the realm of the pedagogies of the project, based on a complaint or criminal charge that would sustain the victim’s position. Later, when I asked Chara if she wanted to file a charge that could, in my view, begin a process based on laws about human trafficking, which would include the transportation to be submitted to “slave labor”, Chara rejected it for not seeing any advantage in such a charge.2 She believed that under that law it would be difficult for her to attain documents, which was her greatest desire at the time. She preferred to await the resolution of her refugee process, which did not take place until the time when Chara and Jahzara, once again unemployed and evicted from that small house where they paid rent, decided to leave the country.
26Adriana Piscitelli (2016) affirms that although the applicable local laws are based on a language expressing human rights protection, and inspired by the Palermo protocol, which is the international legal instrument that addresses human trafficking, they have offered little protection to people considered victims of this crime. The local laws tend to involve security measures that repress migration and prostitution. Brazilian law has not been used to guarantee the right to documents for people identified as victims of human trafficking. Piscitelli and Lowenkron (2015) observe that the notion of victim is triggered in a field of disputes between who can or cannot be framed in the category. These technologies seek to engender processes of subjectivation with the objective that the people “technically defined as trafficked” develop a type of awareness of their condition as victims (Piscitelli e Lowenkron 2015: 36).
27For the participants of the project who I was able to accompany more closely, the engendering of the identity of “victim of gender violence” was not very successful, at least not in the format of a complaint. In Chara’s view, as well as that of Judith and Angelina, based on their interpellations, this place of victim also did not offer an advantage, precisely because they did not see in it any guarantee of rights beyond criminal punishment of men in their “community”. To the contrary, in their places of affection and conviviality, to be a “victim of gender violence” placed them in a position of inferiority. They would be “spoken of badly” and risk not finding their economic and emotional sustenance in that “community”.
28The escape from the house of her employers and the search for new opportunities to gain documentation through a request for refugee status would represent important steps in Chara’s slow material and subjective reconstruction, as did the encounter with Jahzara and the networks of affection that she could access through her relationship with Jana and the project meetings. This possible reconstruction, as Das (1995) affirmed, would depend on arduous and daily work to reconstruct relations in their so-called “community”. This “community” materializes not an amorphous cultural group but an affective sharing and economic and material support. The idea of a criminal complaint as a complete and abrupt rupture in a situation of violence, in this sense, corresponds to an ideal that, in the lives of Chara, Angelina and Judith, is not made concrete.
Frontiers of gender, frontiers of nation
29The pedagogies aimed at migrants and refugees also participate in the production of frontiers. Gender, nationality, and processes of racialization are central elements of this production, because they give structure to government relations, and to notions raised from these regulations and fixations. I return here to the analysis of Anne McClintock (2010), which demonstrates that the production of national territories involves the invention and production of anachronic spaces to be penetrated, conquered and explored. In this construction, the frontiers are traced from innumerous technologies of violence.
30Similarly, Veena Das (1995) indicates that the production of frontiers forged at a historic moment of partition – the violent process of separation between India and Pakistan – was only possible because it was anchored in kidnappings and violations of women, on both sides of the conflict. The authors mentioned indicate the centrality of gender in the production of national frontiers. What I would like to emphasize, however, is that the processes of violence that produce frontiers and delimit nations also delimit imaginations about territories and populations to which correspond specific narratives about gender relations at their limits.
31Chandra Mohanty (1984) offers important reflections about the symbolic and material production of the subjects who inhabit these territories. Mohanty identifies that “white” and “Western” feminisms have fundamental participation in this production by articulating the category “third world women” or the analogous “women of color”. While the so called “first world” would be produced as such because it allegedly participates in more egalitarian and free gender relations, the “women of the third world” represent a homogenous group; women whose worlds would be permeated by poverty, oppression and incivility.
32With this reflection in mind, I return to the account of Chara, who did not identify with Dalva’s talk, and with the position of the victim she performed during the event. To the contrary, Chara had pity on Dalva. Chara’s pity can be read as a type of refusal to identify with the position of victim aimed at her in this context. To identify with this condition would mean occupying a position of distinct victimization. Dalva was a victim who remade herself by filing a complaint and making a public declaration. Not Chara, nor Judith or Angelina, who affirmed that “in our community” things were different and that there were differences permeated by more complex hierarchies.
33Another layer of analysis is related to the sinuous interplay of the processes of imputation of and claim to the category of victim, in which operate intricate techniques of attribution of similarities and differences whose effect is to reinforce hierarchies among victims, and between those people who should claim this recognition from institutional networks and policy makers. Maria Claudia Coelho (2010) indicates that compassion, in the realm of emotional economies, has the power to approximate people in some aspects, and to simultaneously deepen differentiations between them. This is because it is possible to feel pity only for those who occupy a distinct social place from oneself, in a process of intensification of asymmetries between one who feels compassion and the object of compassion. To identify with Dalva’s talk and with the position performed by her would mean to occupy one more position of victimization, beyond those associated to processes of forced movement and degrading work, with everything that is reserved for these victims. Chara’s compassion can thus be read as a type of refusal to identify with the position of the victim destined for her in this context.
The cultural “other”
34The Congolese Jana was invited by the project organizers to be a “cultural mediator”. She was the one who suggested that some of the conversation circles should be held in the neighborhood of Cidade A.E. Carvalho. Jana warned that most of the women who lived there could not go to meetings in downtown São Paulo, because they did not have the financial resources to do so and because the activities of care that they exercised in their homes did not allow a prolonged absence on weekends. She took the initiative to contact the pastor of an evangelical church in the neighborhood and got permission to hold the meetings at the church on Saturdays.
35Jana lived on the second floor of a rented house, divided among various families, like those that in the past were called “cortiços”. The owner of the house was a Brazilian woman. Jana had left the Democratic Republic of the Congo with her newborn baby. She had worked as a lawyer for a number of international entities. It was, however, her position as a leader among the “Congolese refugees” in the city, as well as her previous work as a community healthcare agent that led to her be invited to be a “cultural mediator” in the UN project. The name given to those responsible for organizing the conversation circles in the “territories” is suggestive because, on one hand, it presupposes a “cultural” difference between Brazilians and refugees and on the other, it assumes a “cultural” homogeneity in other “territories”. The interposition of these “cultural” frontiers reinforced hierarchies and imaginations related to a difference produced in the project’s spaces for interaction. Even if it was recognized in the interventions that “gender violence” was a “universal truth”, or that is, that this violence took place everywhere, it was supposed that it acquired particular contours in territories such as Cidade A.E. Carvalho. In these processes of territorialization of violence, the “other” territories, whether they are denominated “Congo”, “Africa” or “Cidade A. E. Carvalho”, were places imagined as confins, in which distinct modes of violence were being narrated based on countless reports.
36As a “cultural mediator”, Jana was being positioned at a frontier between different worlds. Nevertheless, even if she formed a type of “bridge” because of her position as “community leader”, according to the knowledge of the professionals, technicians, and consultants, Jana was still located as making a “cultural” interpretation of these alterities. In this sense, the action of the “cultural mediators”, while indicating recognition of certain social and activist abilities of these women, produced what James Clifford called, for the context of anthropology, “coherent cultural others and interpreting selves” (Clifford 1988: 100). These “cultural others” are produced by the “technical” and professional discourse of the staff and consultants of these organizations.
37Jana was late on the day that I arrived accompanied by Chara to the church where the project meeting was held, when we took the doughnuts offered by her husband Alain. The snack was considered an important element for attracting the neighbors with their children, who needed to eat. Carol, a Bolivian woman and another “cultural mediator” who worked with Jana in the neighborhood, was already there when we arrived, as well as 20 other women. It was the last meeting of the year and Jana and Carol suggested an activity for “working with self-esteem”, in which everyone would have to cite at least one quality of the others. The qualities were stated out loud by each one and were then written on colored paper that we kept with us as a memento. We had an emotional meeting, in which appeared affinities as well as deep disagreements that permeate the relations. The theme of “gender violence” was not worked with and not even mentioned. Not one story of violence was shared that day. Jana told me that this was better, because it was not easy to create a spirit of complicity in that environment, to get “people who were so different from each other”, to speak about pain and suffering considered so intimate. In addition, she said, many of the women who participated in the encounters did not even know each other before the beginning of the workshops. This is important information that challenged the notion of cultural proximity and its automatic transcription to affinity and affect.
38Jana did not share at any of the meetings the situation of violence that she suffered when she was arrested for her political activities in Kinshasa. From her perspective, this did not fit into the space of the conversation circles. She had various reasons. She thought that to expose herself would place her in a vulnerable position in relation to those women. She had struggled for the recognition of the position as leader that she occupied. To position herself as a victim could mean losing all this as well. In addition, her neighbors and friends did not know the details of her imprisonment. Some occupied a political spectrum different from hers, and it was not necessarily possible to establish a complicity related to what she suffered in those days.
39The torture that she suffered in prison and that she only spoke of tangentially was also not seen by Jana as “gender violence”. She did not give release to her suffering by complaining. Jana was a militant whose struggle did not stay in the past, in a territory and in a time of violence that was left behind. Her denouncement was of a regime of political terror that continued to perpetuate at that time in her country. It was also a denouncement in name of other victims: of women who were abused in the context of war whom she attended in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Even if her professional activity in the east of the Congo was not sufficiently recognized in São Paulo (an activity similar to that of some of the staff of the organizations that implement the project) this was the place that Jana wanted for herself. Since she came to Brazil, however, the only position that it was possible for her to occupy was that of victim of violence, of a refugee. She was asked to speak as an expert in suffering, therefore as an example more than as a professional, intellectual or militant.
40The subjectivity attributed to Jana was that of a victim with expertise, denominated a “cultural mediator” who presented an essential and affective proximity to the other women in the project, particularly the Africans. Despite national differences, experiences of racialization and political, educational and class baggage, it was supposed that all of them came from territories of violence and that they should learn to denounce this as a mode of regeneration. This is what made gender violence a “universal truth”: a pretense universality of the victim of this violence. This victim could be any Dalva, Chara, or Jana. However, an aspect to which I call attention is that the refusal of this positioning of victim by Chara and Jana – but unlikely by Dalva – can mean a denial of this universality. A denial read as an insufficient socialization, legal knowledge or even ignorance in relation to democratic mechanisms. Denial of liberty, of modernity and of autonomy.
41It is in this sense that I argue that the narrative (im)possibility to place the harm suffered by Chara and Jana in the lexicon of “gender violence” operates in the production of civilizational frontiers on different scales. These are processes that approximate the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Cidade A.E. Carvalho as territories of violence that are supposedly marked by a lack of intervention, of criminal complaints, and of the state. I indicate that these frontiers are raised from policies and practices of regulation of affective relations in daily life. In their production, to identify with the victim of gender violence, to be indignant about this violence and believe in the pedagogies and legal and criminal solutions is to take a position alongside modernity, it is to position oneself as a free and autonomous subject.
42For Jana, the suffering, which is intimately connected to political struggle, was the fuel that allowed her to continue. This does not mean, however, that she saw herself as a mere victim, even less as “the victim of gender violence” as performed by Dalva, who reconstructed herself by filing a complaint. The institutions that protect Dalva, even if they are allegedly the same as those that should protect Jana, produce her as a completely different victim. To not identify with this victim was necessary for Jana’s daily reconstruction of the affective and economic ties that guaranteed her modes of living. To live through and despite this suffering, transposed in struggle, filled her days with hope: of one day being able to return, to once again conduct politics alongside companions from her political party, to see her children who remained in Kinshasa, in the house of their grandparents.
43Returning to the interventions at the event of the local city administration of Sé, by saying that in “our community” it is not like that, Angelina delimited a space in which the elements of searching for social peace through a declaration and a complaint did not always fit, whether because of unemployment, the need to reconstruct affective and family ties, because of “strangerism” 3or even because of a lack of trust or belief in the state’s solutions. The question presented to Dalva: “What to do?”, repositions the civil servant in her place as a representative of the state, as a subject to whom claims for rights and reparations can be made.
44If through her speech Dalva sought to point to the importance of filing a complaint in the spaces designated for this, and emphasizing the agency of the victims in this situation – “I got divorced”– Angelina and Judith return “to the state” the responsibility for solutions that can go beyond the relationship of victim/aggressor. They demanded rights not in the name of a “victim”, but of “our community”. When Angelina and Judith spoke about a domestic order affected by the labor market and by ruptures in the ties of support and affection, they removed the solutions from the realm of willingness to file a complaint or even of the lack of knowledge about laws and norms, redirecting them to demands for social justice. The complaint that the project taught, would thus mean not only denouncing an aggressor, but an entire “culture”, an entire “community”.
45To locate oneself in a particular “community” is to also partially annul the effects of searching for a homogeneous identity of “woman victim of violence” outside the power relations that mark the lives based at the margins as being less worthy of being lived (Butler 2010). It is to demand a place beyond the complaint, and a space of struggle for conditions to recuperate and reconstruct possibilities for material and affectionate living. When they say that in “our community” it is not like that, Judith and Angelina are saying that a complaint does not have the same effects in all places and for any position of subject. This does not mean they do not know “gender violence” and its mechanisms, but they question the applicability of the same institutional solutions in the places governed by practices of criminalization and controls="true" that promote, in the daily lives of these women, an intense material and affective rupture.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 Not by chance, I refer to formulators and implementers in the feminine. A political demand of the sectors of feminist movements refers precisely to the possibility for construction of “safe spaces” in which experiences related to gender violence can be transformed into speech or declarations. The production of these spaces is primarily conditioned on them being exclusively for women. The figure of the “complaint” of which Gregori (1992) speaks is also configured historically, based on declarations in the realm of the institutionalization of feminisms and the combat against violence against women, and later, gender violence. A narrative that produces the victim discursively and a central artefact in the construction of a “case” (Corrêa 1983).
2 For a discussion about the category of “human trafficking” in its contextual approximations and distancing from the historic category of “slave labor” in the Brazilian context see Sprandel (2016).
3 For an analysis of the historic and normative construction of the foreigner in Brazil see Seyferth (2008). I speak of “strangerism” as a process of subjection/subjectivation anchored in the production of subjectivities coming from “other” territories and times, as well as a category of accusation in certain contexts.
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