Demanda social : queixa, decisão e mudança em um estudo de caso de violência conjugal

Abstract

For centuries, violence against women was considered a legitimated right of men to decide on women’s will and bodies. Only very recently in Brazil, with the promulgation of a new law, this kind of violence became a crime. This work aims at investigating how women’s complaint functions when they are victim of domestic violence, especially in cases where this complaint is understood as a mechanism to victimize women, considering her partner as the only one responsible for what happens to her. The research intends to answer the following questions: does the complaint always imply victimization? How does it function otherwise? Can it work as a path to a decision of change in the context of social demand? How does it relate to social demand? The study uses feminist theory to try to understand the complex dynamics of social relations based on male and female anatomical differences. By using discourse analysis, the study aims at arriving at a critical view of how the subject is constituted relationally through her/his own experiences, occupying different positions, not having a consistent unity through time. The work argues that violence against women is part of a deployment of domination. Mechanisms of contention and domestication of the body are set by the body/soul dualism, which is a prototype of other dualisms such as body/mind and men/women, aiming at withdrawing agency from the subject’s over her/his body and sexuality and his/her agency as a subject. In the dichotomy men/women, woman is signified as body; naturally restricting her capacity, where nature marks the depreciation and inevitability of the female condition. As discursive construction, body’s contours are the privileged metaphor for demarcating (individual and social) borders between what is a viable body and an unviable one. Supported by the myth of creation, woman’s body is connoted as demoniac. Her body is regulated and she herself is subordinated. The key word in this discussion is gender, with the related notions/concepts of body, sex, race, identity and power. A quantitative methodology was used to obtain the percentage of body injury exams in the IML-BH in women who had suffered domestic violence. A qualitative methodology of observation of how the women were attended in the IML was used as well. Besides, non-structured interviews compose a case study with one woman who had been victim of domestic violence. Her discourse is analyzed, in view of the discussion of women’s complaint as victimism. The analysis is supported by the concepts of social demand, decision and change. The data point to a possibility of the complaint being understood as necessary in the process of decision to change.