Omission as discourse: femicide, denialism and the State's (ir)responsibility in the official news of Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

This article examines how the official discourse of the State of Rio Grande do Sul constructs femicide in the news released by its state agency between January 2025 and June 2026. It draws on Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, for whom femicide is a crime of State, and on Rita Segato's reading of gender violence as a strategy for the reproduction of the system, articulated with the modalities of denial described by Stanley Cohen. The corpus comprises thirty-five pieces in which the term appears in the headline, the subheading or the body of the text, examined through Critical Discourse Analysis in Norman Fairclough's model. The analysis identifies a fixed clause attributing the difficulty of confronting the crime to its occurring predominantly inside homes, repeated across five statistical reports over sixteen months, under two different secretaries and despite opposite movements in the indicators. It further identifies the erasure of the agent of lethal violence in twenty-six of the thirty-five pieces, the naming of structural causes in only four of them, and the presentation of one and the same absolute figure alternately as an increase and as a decrease. It concludes that official discourse acknowledges femicide precisely to the extent that such acknowledgement releases the State from obligation, rather than denying it, displacing onto the domestic sphere and onto the victim's initiative what is constitutionally owed by the State itself.