1123 Gender stereotypes, violence against women and citizenship
WG Gender, Law and Society
Room: B2.01
The themes chosen for the RCSL/SDJ Lisbon meeting particularly echo the research interests of the Gender, Law and Society WG of the RCSL. The current international context sadly provides for endless examples of gendered and sexualized violence across borders, as well as of the reproduction of gender-based bias, subordination and oppression both at local and global levels. An un-exhaustive list may include: the ‘global gag rule’ reinstated by Donald Trump, that poses a very real health threat on women needing an abortion; the persistence of the pay gap and the glass ceiling; the ‘glass cliff’ phenomenon in the political sphere; the issue of human trafficking notably for the purposes of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation, that disproportionately and adversely affects women; the conditions hindering access to citizenship and related rights; the everyday harassment and violence suffered by women and LGBT communities.The power structures and justice systems across the world, despite decades of feminist/antidiscrimination struggles for equality, seem to perpetuate patriarchal and heteronormative ways of exercising power and in/justice beyond the nation-state borders. In this session, we would like to welcome papers analysing these phenomena from a theoretical, historical or field-based perspective, that shed light on the intersectional, transnational and global dimensions of gender-based violence as well as the colonial legacy that is embedded in them, especially in times of a ‘migration crisis’. We are particularly interested in ways, stakes and practices enacted by women and sexual minorities – individually or in coalitions – to challenge, articulate, resist and contrast these forms of oppressions.
Chair: Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec
Discussant: Anne-Claire Sanz-Gavillon
Ana Guerreiro | FDUP/ISMAI/UMAR
Pedro Sousa | FDUP
Sílvia Gomes | CICS.NOVA - UM
Women and organized crime: what role do gender studies play?
Abstract
Women were commonly confined to private sphere and only men had roles in the public domain. Consequently, the role of women in crime was, for a long time, neglected; a fact that changed during the 1970s, period in which the international studies about women in crime increased. Despite this, in Portugal only in the 1980s this area of interest emerges with a few authors and more recently with many others, predominantly female. In general, first theorists on the criminal behavior argued women committed fewer crimes than men due to their physical and emotional characteristics, such as maternity, sexual coldness, weakness and underdeveloped intelligence. However, other perspectives affirm that women do commit crimes, but they are “masked crimes”, while men are more likely to commit violent crimes. Considering specifically the organized crime, international studies had always focused on men’s crime. Nevertheless, some recent studies show that women took a relevant role in criminal organization as well in some periods of history. From this point on, and integrated in a PhD research, we aim to examine the role women have in organized crime in Europe nowadays and, to do so, we question what role may gender studies play in understanding gender roles inside criminal organizations, a crime that is traditionally, considering its nature, seen as violent and, therefore, male. What gender studies may be called to enlighten the understanding of women behavior in such a type of crime?
Marina Oliveira Guimarães | Universidade de Coimbra
Quem são essas “mulheres”? Uma releitura sobre as mulheres protegidas pela Lei brasileira 11. 340/2006, Lei Maria da Penha
Abstract
A lei brasileira 11.340/2006, também conhecida como Lei Maria da Penha, é um instrumento de proteção às mulheres em situação de violência doméstica e familiar, violência que se configura por meio de ação ou omissão baseada no gênero. Em setembro de 2017, uma decisão em sede de Agravo de Instrumento da 4ª Câmara Criminal do Tribunal de Justiça do Rio de Janeiro, concedeu medidas de proteção a uma mulher transgênero contra seu ex-namorado, um homem transgênero, aplicando a Lei Maria da Penha. Este caso, motivador do presente trabalho, traz à tona a seguinte indagação: a quais pessoas a Lei Maria da Penha, como instrumento protetivo das mulheres, pode ser aplicada? Como tentativa de se responder a essa pergunta e utilizando o conceito de gênero e de inteligibilidade (não inteligibilidade) da filosofa norte-americana Judith Butler, pretende-se demonstrar que a decisão judicial subverte a lógica jurídico-normativa expandindo a noção de mulher ao reconhecer uma transgênero como sujeito de direito protegido pela Lei. Para Butler, o direito não só representa, como também cria sujeitos. Desta maneira, decisões como essa são relevantes na medida em ampliam o entendimento de sujeito de direito, que ao desconstruir o termo “mulher” acaba por resignificá-lo.
Tiago Ribeiro | CES/FEUCD
A origem da tragédia sexual: uma contribuição sócio-histórica
Abstract
A construção histórica do campo forense constitui um momento de viragem nos modos de produção de conhecimento e de regulação jurídica da sexualidade, o que o converte num objecto de investigação particularmente desafiante para uma sociologia crítica do direito. O objectivo desta comunicação é contribuir para uma análise genealógica dos saberes e poderes jurídico-psiquiátricos que modelaram a consciência e a representação normativa da sexualidade, tirando partido de uma incursão exploratória pela bibliografia e pela produção pericial portuguesa da primeira metade do século XX. Enquanto testemunho da falência ou da emergência de regimes específicos de veridicção e juridicção, as fontes de direito documentam exercícios de enunciação sexual abertos ao trânsito de conceitos, ideias e convicções epistémico-morais. Este regresso ao passado forense visa, desse ponto de vista, colocar em evidência a linhagem e a ambivalência de um conjunto de categorias que têm organizado a mobilização colectiva, o antagonismo social, a reforma política e o discurso público em torno da identidade, da liberdade, da orientação ou da perigosidade sexual.
Mafalda Ferreira | FMUP - Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto
Sofia Neves | ISMAI/ CIEG
Sílvia Gomes | ISMAI/U.Minho
'Kill or be killed’: Narratives of female victims of gender violence condemned by the murder of their partners
Abstract
Although the term "marital murder" refers mainly to femicide because it is in fact the most common phenomenon and the one that media also portrays the most, this perspective gives a merely partial view of this problem, hiding from the public eye the cases in which women kill their abuser in order to survive in gender violence contexts. In related literature, it is possible to find a range of concepts that explain the phenomenon, among them: the Battered Woman Syndrome, the Feminist Theory of Law (Feminist Jurisprudence) and the issue of Self Defense. Based on a research about conjugal homicide, this communication aims to (i) analyze the profiles of inmates as victims/offenders and their relationship with the offender/victim, and to (ii) examine the concept of self-defense in murder scenarios committed by gender violence victims in intimate contexts against their partners. These purposes are achieved by analyzing 13 individual prison files, and by conducting 6 interviews with women prisoners convicted for homicide on this typology of crime. The social characterization of these women and knowing their life trajectories and the relations they had with their (former) partners leads us to question the demonization they usually face. Data also show there are gaps in individual cases for the necessary validation of the prior existence of domestic violence, and none of the situations were considered self-defense or privileged homicide when the necessary criteria were filled out. By doing so, judicial and prison system works negligently, making these women victims, once again: if they start as being victims of their abuser partners, they end as being victims of a system that judges them according to gender stereotypes that do not allow them any kind of violence.
Monica N. Acosta | Basque Country University
From ‘private’ silences to ‘public’ truth: Violence against indigenous women in Colombia
Abstract
Women and armed conflict were identified as one of the twelve areas of particular concern at the Beijing Conference (1995). In most cases, violence against women in wartime is related to “peacetime” attacks, that is, the continuum of discrimination and subordination of daily life. Women usually remain within their roles built before, during and after the conflict. Colombia is not an exception of this. Since 2005, it has developed an extensive and well-defined normative institutionalization to address human rights abuses and to end the armed conflict, including a gender perspective. However, in this scenario, the participation and inclusion of indigenous women struggles are scarce. They are even more affected by the armed conflict, because of their cosmovision, relationship with the territory and their status as women within communities. Not only suffer as individuals, the whole people is affected. Thus, the objective is to analyse and visualize how the indigenous women affections have been constructed within the TJ framework since 2005 until now. The point of departure is that indigenous women affections are not just sexual and public, there are also private, economic and spiritual violence. Nor it is just a battle between men that is waged in the women bodies. The analysis based on a “multisite ethnography”, will take as reference the field work with the Colombian educational program Escuela Intercultural de Diplomacia Indigena -EIDI and, the participant and non-participant observation in some scenarios.
Barbara Giovanna Bello | Università degli Studi di Milano
Intersectionality in theory and practice in migrant women’s everyday life
Abstract
In this presentation, I will elaborate on the extent to which intersectionality has been addressed in different domains in Europe to protect migrant women’s rights and make it possible to part-take in the society on equal foot with others and access full citizenship. Although legal texts and case-law don’t explicitly refer to intersectionality, the analysis shows that the premises have been coming into being to apply law and policy "intersectionally".