Histórias de vida de mulheres condenadas pelo tráfico de drogas: um estudo sobre identidade de gênero

Abstract

The female criminality has experienced a significant growth in recent years, especially related to the drug trafficking. Normally, the involvement of women with trafficking is explained by the thesis of bandit love, in which the male figure is seen as determinant, as if the women had a less transgressive nature and they would probably be submissive to the will of their men. Assuming that this explanation is based on hegemonic constructions of gender, that produces a binary, hierarchical and oppositional gender, this research aimed to investigate the construction of women's gender identity that were convicted with a final judgment or even responded to criminal prosecution for drug trafficking crime, in the Regional Female Prison of Campina Grande-PB, for that we were based on their life histories. The specific objectives were to identify if these women build accounts positioning themselves as victims in order to justify the entry into the crime and / or if they positioned themselves as protagonists of this event; and identifying the repertoires used by them, paying attention to the continuities and ruptures in their positions related to the gender discourses. The gender identity has been treated here as a discursive construction, we constructed the theoretical background with the perspective of Judith Butler and Joan Scott. The methodology we used was the Oral History, having as a sample eight narratives of their life histories. In the data analysis, we used the method proposed by Mary Jane Spink, who works with dialogical maps as a data analysis technique, which served to understand the process of a dialogic interaction and the perception of the positions taken by the interviewees. In the results, it was observed that the identities of these women were built in a very complex way, for that reason they had contradictions and ambivalences. The main discursive strategy used by the narrators was to present external elements to the women‘s will as decisive for their entry into trafficking: although male influence has been recurrent in the discourse, other factors have also appeared, such as economic necessity, affective relationships, the lack of stability and the violence present in their family environment. In most of the cases, the narrators built their identity positions established for the female gender, even though they have been positioned to subvert their gender norms - in this case, commonly known as "diversion" to heteronormativity, without questioning about the "truths‖ that were socially established.