Research Article | | Peer-Reviewed

Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection

Received: 7 May 2024    Accepted: 3 June 2024    Published: 19 June 2024
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Abstract

This paper presents the result of partial research that investigates how the colonial heritages present in Brazilian History and their structural reverberations impact the region context of feminicide in the State of Minas Gerais, outlining a Brazilian reality. Considering the existence of concrete difficulties to hear women who suffer feminicide attempts, based on the memorialistic narratives of women who suffered feminicide attempts, such as the lack of security due to death threats to which they are subjected, this sample counts with a number of fifteen women heard in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, appointed by a non-governmental organization that operates in the region, on the combat gender violence. As a data collection technique, it has been chosen the memorialistics narratives because they allow us a more careful way to approach traumatic scenes. In this article, specific, it was analyzed the cases of four of these women with the aim of demonstrate, through the interface between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and decolonial thinkers, that studies the Afro-Latin American feminism, how violence against these women reveals in their bodies (sometimes, Black) the emergence of a territory to be invade, explored, dominated, and annihilated. It is expected to demonstrate, in the cases presented and through the chosen methodology, the effects of the State´s transgeneratinality and impunity on the naturalization of violence and domination.

Published in Social Sciences (Volume 13, Issue 3)
DOI 10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12
Page(s) 52-60
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Memorialistics Narratives, Feminicide, Colonial, Violence, Psychoanalysis

1. Introduction
In the scope of the research developed at the Laboratory of Psychoanalys and Social Criticism – LAPSC (Laboratório de Psicanálise e Crítica Social - LAPCRIS), from the Postgraduate Program in Psychology at Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais – PCU Minas (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais - PUC Minas), Brazil, in the Psychosocial Processes research line, it was started, in 2023, a study to question the presence of colonial reverberations in the feminicide scenario in Brazil and, from there, identifying possible ways to tackle the problem.
The Pan American Health Organization estimated that, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the prevalence of aggressions against women by their intimate partner would be 25%. Currently, of the 20 countries that kill the most women in the world through feminicide, 11 are in Latin America, and Brazil is one of them. Latin America, as it is known, consists of an immense continental territory in which colonial geography left deep marks of violence in the construction of its History, for at least 500 years.
Geographer Moscatiello states that Latin America is the most lethal region for women in the world and that, in 2020, Brazil was the leader in feminicides in the region. Two years later, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean – ECLAC (Comissão Econômica para a América Latina e Caribe – CEPAL) indicated that Brazil still occupied an uncomfortable fifth place as the country with the highest rate of violence against women in Latin America . Although these data vary in accuracy, as there are many underreporting cases, they undoubtedly reveal a scenario that questions those who have eyes to see and ears to listen, as Freud would say, about the reality of the traumatic finding of an anti-civilization dimension that feminicide denounces.
The historical series about violence in Brazil began in 1989 with the Institute for Applied Economic Research Institute - IAERI (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada - IPEA). Nevertheless, regarding violence directed at women, in particular, crimes of feminicide, started to be registered in 2006 , when the country implemented Law No. 11, 340/2006, the so-called Maria da Penha Law , which creates mechanisms to curb domestic violence against women.
However, it appears that the Law implementation did not impact the reduction in cases, revealing a reality that cannot be eliminated despite changes in the legal system. The number of feminicides in Brazil continued to increase, with rare periods of insignificant drops. In 2005, the year before the Maria da Penha Law, recorded 3, 887 homicides of women in Brazil; in 2006, the year the law was implemented, there were 4, 030 cases. Between 2009 and 2019, 50, 056 cases were recorded, which means that, in the period, every two hours, a woman was murdered in Brazil. In another attempt to address the reality in question, in 2015, the country enacted another Law, 13, 104/2015 , whose purpose was to classify feminicide as a hideous crime. It is not always possible to classify feminicide as such, which is why data relating to the murder of women is important in the general analysis.
In this context, an intersectional perspective of gender, race and social class is necessary. Of the 3, 737 women murdered in Brazil in 2019, 2, 468 were black. The context of social vulnerability is not determinant, as feminicides have occurred among women from all social classes. However, it is an unquestionable fact that a vulnerability scenario acts as an aggravating factor, especially regarding poor, black, trans and peripheral women.
In 2022, the map of violence against women in Brazil, produced by , indicated that the regions where the most women were murdered due to their gender condition, in absolute numbers, were the Northeast, with 1, 295 deaths; Southeast, with 1, 014; and South, with 554 cases. In the North Region, there were 513 murders, and in the Central-West, there were 361.
In the paper that is present, it is seeked to give voice to four women who have suffered attempts at feminicide in recent years to extract from their stories some colonial reverberations expressed in the social field. To protect their identities, it was named each one by a trait representative of the solutions found by them to confront femicide: the woman/mother, the entrepreneur, the teacher and the university student.
2. Methodology: Listening to the Voices of Feminicide
The methodological path chosen to listen to women who suffered feminicide attempts was memorialistic narratives, as proposed by Guerra et al. , with groups and populations in situations of vulnerability and violence. Among other aspects, the method was chosen because it allows us to approach the trauma in a careful and non-invasive way. Considering the existence of concrete difficulties to hear women who suffer feminicide attempts, such as the lack of security due to death threats to which they are subjected, fifteen women were interviewed on the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, in the State of Minas Gerais, Southeast Region of Brazil. The method establishes three investigation times: time to narrate, create, and share. The survey sample consist in a number of fifteen women. In this specific article, it was needed dedication to work the time to narrate through reading and discussing emerging categories in four chosen narratives of women who suffered attempts at feminicide.
The women participating in the research were recommended to us by non-governmental organizations who work in the State of Minas Gerais with women in situations of gender-based violence and social vulnerability. After telephone contact through WhatsApp messages, the collection of narratives was scheduled and performed in person at a place and time chosen by those women. One preferred to carry out the narrative at home, two at their workplace and another at the PUC Minas campus. The interviews were conducted by one or two researchers and consisted of a free and spontaneous invitation for each woman to be able, as long as she wanted, to tell us her story.
"Tell us your story" was what it was asked. The invitation to talk about oneself consists of offering their word to the research participant as the protagonist of their own story. Free association, a technique formalized in psychoanalysis by its creator, Sigmund Freud, was chosen as a discursive production strategy. After being recorded with the participants' authorization, the narratives went through a transcription process so that the analyses could be formalized within the scope of the research. This time was preceded by reading the guidelines in the Free and Informed Consent Form - FICF (Termo de Consentimento Livre e Esclarecido - TCLE) and approval by the University's Research Ethics Committee- REC (Comitê de Ética em Pesquisa - CEP) as necessary measures for conducting research with human beings.
The team, made up of two permanent professors from the Postgraduate Program in Psychology at PUC Minas, master's students, doctoral students, and volunteer researchers, met fortnightly, in meetings lasting 1 hour and 30 minutes, for theoretical discussions and case analysis throughout 2023. Prior to the meetings, each team member listened to the narratives based on a guiding axis: identifying the presence of colonial reverberations present in the narratives of gender violence against women participating in the research, in the sense of verifying whether they function as intersectional markers for the context of feminicide, as it occurs in the Brazilian reality. With this guiding principle, psychoanalytic professors from partner universities were invited to contribute to clinical and decolonial discussions in the narratives at each meeting. The categories emerging from the narratives were extracted during discussions in which, in free speech, the researchers presented ideas, concepts and meanings that stood out most during listening.
It seems important to mention that, due to our methodological choice, these women were not asked how they declared themselves in relation to their skin color. However, one cannot fail to mention the intersectional markers of social class, gender, and race visible in face-to-face meetings and at specific points in the narratives. Therefore, despite not locating the ethnic-racial theme as a category, it is worth mentioning that this is an element that can compose gender-based violence against women. It is important to highlight that the organizations that enabled us to contact women worked with low-income women, and, in the Brazilian case, it was found more black and brown women in this group.
The first is a 44-year-old black woman currently in her second marriage. She is the mother of three children and studied until elementary school, that is, until 14 years old. She had her first child as a teenager, suffered an attempt at feminicide in her first marriage and, in her second, is currently experiencing psychological gender violence. The second woman is white, 29 years old, separated from her husband, mother of three children and pregnant with her fourth. At 16, her husband prevented her from continuing her studies. She is an orphan of maternal feminicide when, while still a child, her mother was murdered by her then-boyfriend. She recently separated from her husband, but for years, she suffered psychological gender-based violence. The third is a 32-year-old woman, mixed race, single and without children. She is the only woman in the family who attended higher education. She suffered an attempt at feminicide by her ex-partner. The fourth is a young, 20-year-old black woman, single and without children, who suffered an attempt at feminicide and sexual abuse from her father during her childhood and adolescence. She is preparing to enter university. Based on this path, in this paper, there was dedication to discuss two emerging categories described below.
The first category was the transmission of violence, which, in the narratives, is evident in two ways: in the transgenerational family relationship and the patriarchal relations established in the actions of the State. This point seems decisive to us in the maintenance of domestic violence against women. In the category of transmission of violence, it is believed it is important to stress the conceptual differences between violence and aggressiveness.
Moving on to the second category, one can say that if the first category is frequent in theoretical reflections on gender violence against women, the second appears as a finding of this research, which reveals an intersectional marker of violence against women in the colonial context, the desire for appropriation and exploitation of the woman's body as a territory to be dominated. This is the notion that, in this context, the female body is treated as a body to be colonized through the physical and psychological force exerted by normative masculine identities. It was decanted in these women's narratives a colonizing perspective of these violent men about their bodies as if the wife or/and the daughter's bodies were property that needed a territorial marking with abuse. Thus, the categories were built based on listening to the team, always articulating psychoanalytic theory and decolonial knowledge.
3. The Naturalization of Transgenerational Violence and the Maintenance of State-colonial Violence
I came to my grandmother to stay for a few days, and my grandmother didn't accept it. When I spoke to my grandmother: "Grandma, sometimes it's necessary to separate. I can't stand Antônio anymore", she said: "No, men are like that. Your grandfather beat me and kept me awake for 24 hours. You won't let go! Marriage is like that. There is no perfect man. Are you crazy? This man gives you everything. I could never give what you have in your house to your uncles" (Woman/mother).
In the narratives of the women heard in the research, violence and aggressiveness are confused. One of the ways to demonstrate this is revealed in the way gender-based violence against women crosses generations. It is not uncommon to observe a repetition of naturalized stories of violence present among mothers, daughters, and granddaughters. It is understood that transgenerational violence is the effect of the impact of patriarchal and colonial matrix, which previously defines the notion of femininity in the social bond and which affects being a woman from family contexts to legal and religious institutions perpetrated in society.
As Bassols writes, we start from the idea that if the understanding of violence practiced by human beings has some nature, it cannot be biological. Since culture is founded by the actions and effects of language on the body, so are any human actions. In fact, in since psychoanalysis, it is known that the denaturalization of the biological record of instincts through language revealed another type of instinct whose nature is symbolic: the drive. Human violence, therefore, seen from this perspective, can only be understood within the symbolic register. Therefore, it is not possible to " Much less could the violent act against women be explained by resorting to a supposed instinctive naturalness prior to the symbolic world where subjective experience happens" (our translation).
However, the paradox involved leads us to see that, in the context of violence, the violent act is a paradigm of what appears as what erupts at the point where language fails when it is deprived of the social bond . Consequently, there is also the dissolution of the relationship between the other and the similar one with which identification operates. As a coercive form of exercising power, violence will always be a sign of the word failure and, as Bassols writes, "If psychoanalysis is opposed in principle to all types of violence, it is to the same extent in which manifests the most radical respect for the other word".
Regarding abused women, the violence that falls on them is a sign of failure to listen and validate their words. Nevertheless, if it is far from the primitive condition established by the ancestors of humanity concerning violence, given the conditions that civilization has been in for a long time, how can one explain recurring experiences of diverse violence, including feminicide, which are still present in societies, so-called civilized people of the 21st century, like what happens in the Brazilian scenario?
The police still went to so much trouble to get him out because they were policemen who were friends of his to make the occurrence. So, they didn't use the kind of force on him that they usually use on anyone they don't know, you know? I only know that it took them almost four hours to get him out of the house. He took a shower; talked; threatened me from inside the bathroom, and said that if I left there, he was going to kill me, with the cops inside the house! I went up to the police station, went through all the procedures, made the report, and ended up in hospital. At the forensic examination, the doctor in front of me slapped the nurse on the head and said that women really should be beaten. At my examination, they didn't ask me for an X-ray of anything. I was in much pain for a long time, but after seeing the process as it happened, I don't know, but the impression I got was that the less I was diagnosed with something, some injury, the less difficult the process would be for him, and not for me... When I arrived at the police station to give my statement, he was outside the cell. He hadn't even been arrested (The teacher).
In Bouasse's optical experiment, Lacan introduces a flat mirror. He makes it equivalent to a surface and names it the Other, whose function is to operate the "signification" of the imaginary, based on the organizers, typical of the current social order. In the theme it is dealed with, this order is none other than part of the colonial project. From the considerations of Quijano , we see that the multiple acts of violence used in him were the mainspring to leverage a planetary device for the production of violence, inequalities and modes of subjectivities that, among other aspects, leave, as the remainder of an equation, the destitution of women through the domination of their bodies and their voices. Feminicide, in these terms, seems to be an intolerant response from masculine-normative-colonial modes of subjectivation to the impossibility of a symbolic elaboration of the feminine in social discourse.
Aggressiveness, on the other hand, has a very specific conceptual character in psychoanalysis. In Freud, it begins to be bordered by the concept of drive. One of the ways to do this is by returning to the concept of narcissism and the vicissitudes of the drive, especially the reversion into its opposite, as is the case of love and hate. When introducing the concept of narcissism, Freud proposes that the drive is linked to the Self and can also be directed to another external object, while it returns to the Self, now the seat of the narcissistic libidinal drive. Later, the deadly character of the drive appears in Freud's clinic : "We go like that: the person will change, right. Ah, this is normal, jealousy, I'm going to change, it's a love thing, I don't know what and what… It's something like that that we don't. We don't put a stop to it. That's why it happens" (The woman/mother).
The additional component, which cannot fail to be mentioned, is precisely the contradictory and paradoxical presence of Eros in the dynamics of self- and hetero-aggression present in the scenario of violence against women. In Freud, sadism is a narcissistic form of aggression, whose object is the other, and masochism is its self-aggressive aspect, in which the Self is taken as an object, revealed by the death drive. Freud highlights a destructive manifestation strongly linked, in its origin, to sexuality and erotic life. In sadism, although the death drive deforms the erotic objective in its meaning, it satisfies, on the other hand, the erotic impulse, demonstrating that its connection with Eros remains unchanged. Moreover, even when sadism appears without sexual connotations, "We cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the drive is followed by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment since it presents the ego with the fulfillment of its former omnipotent desires" .
When he came home, he didn't accept the idea of having to leave, so he started hanging me, asking me questions, hanging me. Every question he asked, he asked about my ex-boyfriends. I did it because you did it. However, he kept looking for messages from people who had already been part of my story and asked me to open Facebook and Instagram. He hung me with every question he asked until I lost my breath and threw myself on top of things. And then, at this point, he grabbed me by the neck, squeezed me... So, I had to spend the whole time trying hard for him not to break my neck, holding his hand, and he threw me on the bed, the whole bed fell apart... Moreover, he said, "I need to get something to finish what I want". He talked about getting a knife and getting a gun, that he was going to get it and that he was going to come back, and then he left the bedroom. When he left, my neighbor was at the door (The teacher).
In so-called narcissistic love, the person taken as an object can represent, as Freud says, a model of the person himself, full of traits that interest him. If narcissism is also defined as investment in oneself, it finds this representative in the return to the Self that the investment in the object causes through the satisfaction it provides. According to Freud , this type of narcissistic love considers the elevation of the sexual object to the sexual ideal based on the fulfillment of infantile love conditions. Santos writes:
"It is impossible that she does not want me because I am all she needs." This statement is, in fact, an aversion. It talks about putting the Self in the place of the object and stating that the other needs the subject and not that he needs the other.
This relationship between libido and object, characteristic of neurotic love, can be experienced when realizing that the loss of the object can become highly threatening to the integrity of the Self, especially when it is identified with colonial/normative modes of subjectivity.
Such a reading, typical of psychoanalysis, offers an understanding of how the colonial/macho man/patriarchal discourse impacts the psyche, articulating the logic that produces the signifiers, which maintains an entire system of maintenance and reproduction of violence against women. In this sense, macho culture offers the subject identified in his normative masculinity the possibility of intensifying his narcissism through the movement of overestimating the sexual object, placing it as an object existing only for his enjoyment.
It is also necessary to highlight Lacan's thesis on aggressiveness in psychoanalysis. As he proposes, unlike violence that inscribes a rupture with the word, aggressiveness is a phenomenon of meaning, an experience that presents itself as a formation of the unconscious. It appears as an intentional form and as an image of bodily dismemberment, which, in itself, is sufficient for it to appear as it is read in the symbolic sense of symptoms. Because it is constituted based on the instinctual operations of the constitution of the Self, its manifestation is crossed by language, which makes its intention explicit. Aggressiveness undermines and disintegrates the bodily experience. It can be sublimated and repressed and does not necessarily have to be "acted out". "My husband's problem is saying things I didn't do. He tortures me for months. He doesn't beat me, but he breaks my psychological system. I can see in his eyes his anger" (The entrepreneur).
In the clinic of neurosis, aggressiveness appears in intention since it presupposes wanting to say something, but at the same time, it maintains a need to blur and manipulate meaning. "When you leave work, be very careful; the parking lot is big, isn't it? So much can happen!" (The entrepreneur). For the subject, the elective vectors of aggressive intentions reflect radical helplessness at a bodily level, the effects of which reproduce the image of dismemberment or disintegration of the bodily Self: "Telling the story isn't easy, and I still see much violence, ah.... If I see someone talking louder, I feel it in my body, you know?" (The teacher). Lacan also points out that aggression is also linked to malaise in culture. It is no wonder that Freud approached it as the drive disposition of the greatest impediment to civilization.
In the language field, aggressiveness is inscribed, leaving its effects, and it is in the rupture with the word that violence is established. Thus, the scene of violence, of the breaking of words, is, paradoxically, transmitted by families and the State in the form of silencing, and, consequently, aggressiveness is naturalized.
4. The colonized Female Body and Normative Masculinity
Marcus was watching me from the gate (Marcus is my father's name). He was watching me from the gate. I entered, and I remember the scene to this day. I went in, he was leaning against the door like this, my mother behind him, then he said: "Oh, XXXXX...". Then, when I looked back, I asked what it was, and there wasn't time for me to finish. He closed his hand, literally in a punch, and stuck it in my face. I think it's the scene I have most vividly in my head. He punched me in the face. I fell back, and he started hitting me, throwing me on the ground, hitting me, hitting me. That day, I passed out, he hit my head. I even have a few dots of blood in my burst eye. I went to the doctor to find out what this was, and the doctor explained to me that it was due to the number of times he hit my head against the wall and the floor. That day, he hit my head against the wall, I fell... I woke up, and he was still hitting me. My mother was trying to separate him, and he was hitting me, hitting me, hitting me, hitting me. My grandmother called the police, Child Protective Services and everything. The police went to the house the next day. He came and acted with me as if nothing had happened. He even turned to me and said: "Are you going to keep dating him?" And so, in several fights that we had discussions, he always had that narrative, "You are mine. No one on the street will catch you from me. You are mine", and I grew up hearing that (The university student).
The young university student in the narrative above is a black woman whose story allows us to tell that of many other ones, albeit from a specific point: having experienced attempts at feminicide in the context of incest. Historically, the murder of women, simply because they are women, can be easily located at any time in History, which allows us to affirm, as Bassols does, that violence against women helps tell the story of civilization. If, on the one hand, the issue of violence against women is ancient, on the other, it was very recently that the murder of women due to their gender condition began to be named for its specificity.
Not by chance, it was up to a South African sociologist, Diana Russell , to consider this type of murder as an act directly addressed to the feminine, leading her to propose the word feminicide in English, to contest and give visibility to the naturalization of homicides linked to the gender condition that the context hid. The context of this origin, specifically, led us to question the reverberations that it has on certain modes of subjectivation, especially those that violate female bodies, through the eyes of a colonial Other.
In these terms, the malaise in civilization, as proposed by Freud , reveals the imperative of colonial enjoyment so that feminicide, by denying the civilizational pact, results in a social symptom. Far beyond a symptom of the times, violence against women is also a symptom of history, that of humanity, which establishes and authorizes as such a colonial Other. In psychoanalysis, the symptom condenses truth and enjoyment, which allows us to question the truth of the time it supports and the enjoyment it reveals. As such, violence in the form of feminicide presupposes a veiled context from which it arises, namely, a concealment, in Brazilian History, of its colonial legacies. A body with an owner; the outline of the university student's narrative is clear, "You are mine. No one on the street will catch you from me. You are mine". Moving on to the narrative of the woman/mother, another aspect of the colonized female body is also highlighted by the dominating man.
I couldn't wear any clothes. Gabriel (my 11-year-old son) grew up.. And one day, he asked me when I was taking him to school: "Why don't you wear pants, Mom? You're going to wear these shorts and show off to my classmates". "Gabriel, Mom's going to talk to you. Mom's not wearing shorts to show off to your classmates. Shorts are an outfit to wear... You're at school, you're a man, you're going to wear a pair of short trousers. I'm a woman. I'm in my day-to-day life. I'm going to wear shorts." I explained to him. But, when he was about 5 or 6 years old, if I said "red nail polish", he didn't like it. "What's that, Gabriel? I liked it, and the manicurist liked it. Did you like it? You liked it, and I liked it too. Why?" "It's a slut's nail, Mom." That's what he heard from his father. Then I took the nail polish bottle and said to him: "Does it say slut nail polish, Gabriel?". "No, Mom." "Then it is not slut's. Not everything your father does is right, not everything your mother does is right, or it's slutty, that doesn't mean anything. Red nail polish is a color a woman likes, it's an eye-catching color, but that doesn't mean whether I'm a slut or not. Do you know what a slut is?" (The woman/mother).
As can be seen, the reverberations of colonial History that permeate the processes of construction of a society, as well as the effects that they have on subjectivity through the processes of coloniality, reveal a particularly specific perspective concerning the female body . In Latin America, new configurations originating from colonial and slave periods update the power exercised by masters in family relationships, in which, as an effect of coloniality, it is observed that white women also corroborate the perpetuation of violence against black women, demonstrating that racism and sexism intersect.
Hooks draws attention to the fact that feminist movements fighting for civil rights and gender equality in the first and second waves of feminism were dedicated to the social ascension of white women at the expense of the enslaved body of a black woman, subjected to other forms of domination. In Brazilian society, this is evident. Colonial heritages participated in the construction of a social structure of hierarchization of white over black women, almost entirely disregarding the patriarchal dimension that brutally subjected and still subjects, in a particular way, black and low-income women.
This aspect is clear in the studies by Gonzalez . The author returns to psychoanalysis to elucidate the discursive construction that results in knowledge about the place of black women in Brazil and the dichotomy produced by the Colonial Period in the country, between masters and enslaved people, and, mainly, the mutilating polarization of the black woman's body, which is located as "mucama" or black mother. Heritage of a colonial project in which the woman's body is seen as an object of sexual satisfaction for white men and, or in the service of maintaining not only their master's house but also responsible for raising their children with their mistresses.
In this sense, Segato's studies provide a specific snapshot of the Brazilian reality that establishes, in this order, a sequence of the place given to black mothers in white family homes as wet nurses, nannies, and housekeepers. The author denounces the aspect of the double denial of race and gender that falls on the invisibility of the bodies of these women who have forcibly raised several generations of children since the colonial period at the expense of not being able to raise their children, who were taken away from them.
It causes us perplexity when realized how much the effects of colonization processes persist in the recent History of many countries, leaving deep marks on colonized bodies. Figueiredo's book, Notebook Of Colonial Memories (Caderno de Memórias Coloniais), is an example of this. The author tells about her childhood living in the city of Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, a colony of Portugal until the 1970s. The author reports how, through her father, his normatively colonial functions and masculinity were producing in her a revealing look at the place of women, white and black, in this process. Within the scope of her History, the body of white women was delineated as the sacred body of the wife and mistress of the home, and that of black women, sexualized bodies that, among other things, served the father's advances to cause humiliation and demonstrate dominance over black men.
The strong connection between the history of Brazilian colonization and that of Africa, a continent marked by the impacts of the various colonization processes that crossed its history and reverberated in multiple forms of violence, is highlighted here. This is because, in both cases, how women and their bodies were situated in this exploratory process goes back to histories of sexual abuse, control, torture, kidnapping, silencing and destitution. To understand the level of violence against women that currently were witness in the Brazilian reality, it is essential that there is no neglect History. The idealized masculinity model that is inscribed in society implies a set of rules and behaviors that are considered natural for men, including not expressing vulnerability, staying active and fulfilling a sexual performance that is considered dominant. This model is fully aligned with the colonizer's image, which leads us to think that the association between violence and masculinity is not by chance on a symbolic level.
In a context marked by domination and invasion of territories, predominant masculinity involves power relations that include enslavement and domination of bodies not recognized as equal. From the moment bodies began to be objectified and used for work, leisure, sex and other purposes, normative masculinity was established, taking on a colonial air. Ultimately, it does not exist without a clear purpose.
Thus, notions of gender as we know them today are colonial heritages imposed on the territory of the Americas, not without conflicts. It is important to note that the dichotomy between masculine and feminine did not find correspondence among the Amerindian peoples, each of which had its worldview, often divergent, even between tribes. Tensions between indigenous conceptions of masculinity and Western influences began during colonization. In this context, monotheistic religion played a significant role in imposing values, roles and culture, mainly through Christianity and patriarchy .
Moreover, my family on my mother's side, which is what prevails most, I was raised with them. She is Catholic, conservative, like, maximum level... When I was younger, I was 10 or 11 years old, I already knelt at my mother's foot and begged her to separate him (from the incestuous father). She didn't do it, because, in her head, like her... Because it was like that. I had a paternal grandfather until he passed away in 2006, but my mother didn't have a father, and her father had an alcohol use disorder, too. So, it's that thing: she just repeated her upbringing, and it became a pattern, and, in her mind, her children had to have a father because she didn't have a father. Nevertheless, there was no father with him inside (The university student).
During the period of slavery, when people were brought on slave ships, the black men who arrived here were not considered holders of colonial hegemonic masculinity but rather simple work instruments at the disposal of slaves' owners. This reality highlights not only the presence of hierarchies between masters and slaves but also between men themselves. It is important to highlight that African and indigenous societies had their visions of reality, the relationship between bodies and the roles to be played, as well as ways of life and the transmission of knowledge. As Sampaio and Garcia write, as a social construction, gender does not have an intrinsic essence but is shaped by the ideals of a time and the predominant culture. Furthermore, if constructed, it can be done through other identities, other signifiers.
One can ask about the consequences of the colonizer's action in depriving the body of the colonized man and the effects of this on the construction of virile masculinity that asserts itself through force, abuse and violence. Although it does not have such answers, since, in this work, we do not listen to men, the reverberations of the colonial project are evident in the modes of subjectivation that locate, in the woman's body, a desire for domination and colonization.
5. Final Considerations
In this article, it is seeked to demonstrate the colonial reverberations present in the context of feminicide, as the Brazilian reality reveals, with the four cases chosen in the sample, through the memorialistics narratives methods, in the interface between the reading of psychoanalysis, decolonial thinkers and some aspects specific to Afro-Latin American feminist theories.
Although the four narratives presented here are not significant in a quantitative sense, they have the merit of giving life, voice and body to other Afro-Latin American women, heirs to the effects of colonial heritages on their bodies. In the narratives, the ethnic-racial theme presents in the stories of the women participating in the research reverberates the colonial legacies that can also be found in other stories, whose national statistics reflect alarming data on feminicide in the country.
We found that the transmission of violence to which women are the object has repercussions through colonial ideals strongly present in social institutions, including the family, religion, and public bodies, as discursive apparatuses that function as vehicles for the reproduction of patriarchal values.
Finally, the narratives reveal that normative masculinity, heir to colonial values, takes the woman and her body as a territory to be invaded, exploited, dominated and annihilated, just as the colonizer does.
Abbreviations

CPEA

Certification of Presentation and Ethical Appreciation

ECLAC

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

FICF

Free and Informed Consent Form

IAERI

Institute for Applied Economic Research Institute

LAPCRIS

Laboratory of Psychoanalys and Social Criticism

PUC

Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais

REC

Research Ethics Committee

Author Contributions
Mônica Eulália da Silva Januzzi: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Viviane Marques Alvim Campi Barbosa: Formal Analysis, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Caio Augusto Dias Monção: Formal Analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Faedra Vilaça Ramos: Formal Analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Anghel Alves de Paula: Formal Analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Nathiéle Araújo Oliveira: Formal Analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Beatriz Machado Gomes: Formal Analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Cite This Article
  • APA Style

    Januzzi, M. E. D. S., Moreira, J. D. O., Barbosa, V. M. A. C., Monção, C. A. D., Ramos, F. V., et al. (2024). Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection. Social Sciences, 13(3), 52-60. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12

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    ACS Style

    Januzzi, M. E. D. S.; Moreira, J. D. O.; Barbosa, V. M. A. C.; Monção, C. A. D.; Ramos, F. V., et al. Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection. Soc. Sci. 2024, 13(3), 52-60. doi: 10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12

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    AMA Style

    Januzzi MEDS, Moreira JDO, Barbosa VMAC, Monção CAD, Ramos FV, et al. Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection. Soc Sci. 2024;13(3):52-60. doi: 10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12,
      author = {Mônica Eulália da Silva Januzzi and Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira and Viviane Marques Alvim Campi Barbosa and Caio Augusto Dias Monção and Faedra Vilaça Ramos and Anghel Alves de Paula and Nathiéle Araújo Oliveira and Beatriz Machado Gomes},
      title = {Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection
    },
      journal = {Social Sciences},
      volume = {13},
      number = {3},
      pages = {52-60},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ss.20241303.12},
      abstract = {This paper presents the result of partial research that investigates how the colonial heritages present in Brazilian History and their structural reverberations impact the region context of feminicide in the State of Minas Gerais, outlining a Brazilian reality. Considering the existence of concrete difficulties to hear women who suffer feminicide attempts, based on the memorialistic narratives of women who suffered feminicide attempts, such as the lack of security due to death threats to which they are subjected, this sample counts with a number of fifteen women heard in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, appointed by a non-governmental organization that operates in the region, on the combat gender violence. As a data collection technique, it has been chosen the memorialistics narratives because they allow us a more careful way to approach traumatic scenes. In this article, specific, it was analyzed the cases of four of these women with the aim of demonstrate, through the interface between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and decolonial thinkers, that studies the Afro-Latin American feminism, how violence against these women reveals in their bodies (sometimes, Black) the emergence of a territory to be invade, explored, dominated, and annihilated. It is expected to demonstrate, in the cases presented and through the chosen methodology, the effects of the State´s transgeneratinality and impunity on the naturalization of violence and domination. 
    },
     year = {2024}
    }
    

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    T1  - Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection
    
    AU  - Mônica Eulália da Silva Januzzi
    AU  - Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira
    AU  - Viviane Marques Alvim Campi Barbosa
    AU  - Caio Augusto Dias Monção
    AU  - Faedra Vilaça Ramos
    AU  - Anghel Alves de Paula
    AU  - Nathiéle Araújo Oliveira
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    JF  - Social Sciences
    JO  - Social Sciences
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    PB  - Science Publishing Group
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    UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ss.20241303.12
    AB  - This paper presents the result of partial research that investigates how the colonial heritages present in Brazilian History and their structural reverberations impact the region context of feminicide in the State of Minas Gerais, outlining a Brazilian reality. Considering the existence of concrete difficulties to hear women who suffer feminicide attempts, based on the memorialistic narratives of women who suffered feminicide attempts, such as the lack of security due to death threats to which they are subjected, this sample counts with a number of fifteen women heard in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, appointed by a non-governmental organization that operates in the region, on the combat gender violence. As a data collection technique, it has been chosen the memorialistics narratives because they allow us a more careful way to approach traumatic scenes. In this article, specific, it was analyzed the cases of four of these women with the aim of demonstrate, through the interface between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and decolonial thinkers, that studies the Afro-Latin American feminism, how violence against these women reveals in their bodies (sometimes, Black) the emergence of a territory to be invade, explored, dominated, and annihilated. It is expected to demonstrate, in the cases presented and through the chosen methodology, the effects of the State´s transgeneratinality and impunity on the naturalization of violence and domination. 
    
    VL  - 13
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