(TRANS)FEMICIDE: MOBILIZATION OF SPEECHES ABOUT GENDER IDENTITY AND SEXUALITY ON JURY TRIAL

Abstract

From an ethnography of a suit and a Jury Trial, it is intended to discuss the limits and tensions of "femicide" as a legal and political category explanatory of murder for gender reasons for understand the murders committed against trans women, partial result of the master's research developed for the Graduate Program in Social Sciences of UNIFESP. The selected case is about a transsexual teenager Médely Razard, murdered in the city of Itaquaquecetuba – São Paulo. Based on the notes made in a field diary during the Jury Trial, it is questioned: considering the main actors of the popular jury, which characteristics emerge and which are suppressed in the identity of the victim during the trial? How does the conflict between sexuality and gender identity manifest itself? What speeches about the identity of the victim are mobilized in order to achieve the conviction of guilty of the accused? How does the construction of the victim's identity influence law enforcement and the choice of a criminal type? Is there discussion about the application of the legal category “femicide”? In the end, it is considered, in the light of the concrete case, what is the role of the law in the construction of the post-mortem victim identity? It is concluded that the criminal law operates from exclusions that can naturalize the notions of "victim" and the sex-gender system itself.