Class and ethnic-racial crossings in coverage of feminicide in the brazilian press

Abstract

Faced with the high number of femicides that occur in Brazil – in 2023, 1.463 women were murdered, the majority being black women (61.1%) –, this article analyses the different treatments given by the Brazilian press to victims of this gender crime, related to ethnic-racial and class intersections. To understand this bias, we turn to Lélia Gonzalez (2020), who examines the triple discrimination suffered by black women in the Brazilian context. The concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2004; Collins; Bilge, 2020) has been applied as a means to understand the specificity of crime against black, peripheral, and underprivileged women. For the analysis, we compared the news coverage of two femicides: Adriana Costa Alvarenga, a black woman; and Thallita Cruz Fernandes, a white woman. The analysis highlights the unequal and disproportionate way in which femicides are reported between white women and racialized women, making the latter invisible in the coverage.