Gender and Violence Between the Home and the Street: The Narrative Construction of the Public/Private Boundary in Brazil

Latin American scholars have problematized the binary between private gender-based violence and public urban violence, highlighting the interconnection of state, urban, and gendered violence. Yet cultural notions of the public and private continue to inform the “gendering” of violence. In this article, we examine how police officers who investigate murders of women (thirty-six inquiries and nine interviews) and girls incarcerated in a juvenile detention center (twenty-two interviews) in Brazil narrate violence through a differential gendering of the categories of the “home” and the “street.” We find that the street is framed as a space of genderless, (drug) market-related, and expected instrumental violence, and the home is a space of gendered and unexpected emotional violence. This framing reduces gender violence to emotional disputes within the family and naturalizes violence in the “street,” portraying it as unavoidable, thus obscuring and legitimating structural state and gender violence against women.