Feminist paradoxes: punitivist discourse against gender violence

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the possibility of conceiving Criminal Law as an ally in the struggle against the problem of gender violence in the Brazilian context. The research is developed from a theoretical narrative bibliographic review, with a criminological-critical contribution, and adopts as frameworks authors who question the universalizing feminist discourse and the current trends – characteristics of conservative times – of criminalizing gender violence and increase in punitive power. Initially, the Maria da Penha and Feminicide Laws are analyzed, in order to demonstrate how the legal-criminal discourse, legitimized by feminist demands, not only represents and recognizes the subjects that deserve protection, but produces the identities that will be protected by the State, imposing requirements for women to become protect. The intensification of criminalization, driven by hegemonic feminist discourses, reveals the paradoxes involved in the relationship between the female sex/gender and the punitive power, arisen from a universal ideal of woman, which ignores sexuality, class, race. Thus, the criminalizing discourse, supposedly universal, ends up protecting exclusively cis, heterosexual, white and middle-class women; paradoxically denying rights to peripheral identities. Finally, to overcome this paradox, a reflection is proposed, based on Foucauldian thinking, about the possibility of building a new law, supported by a post-identity perspective and able to foster practices of resistance to heteronormalizing and excluding technologies.