Parindo um novo mundo: a produção de conhecimento das mães e familiares de vítimas da violência letal do Estado e racismo no brasil

Abstract

This dissertation responds to concerns and questions arising from my personal and academic background. The research encompasses the understanding of mothers and relatives of victims of lethal violence perpetrated by the State as producers of knowledge, based on their perspective, their strategies for struggle, and their knowledge. Its specific objectives are: a) to discuss the construction of race, gender, and motherhood in Brazilian socio-historical formation; b) to present data on territories of lethal violence by the Brazilian state; and c) to present a survey of material published by the movement of bereaved mothers on the process of mourning, struggle, and self-organization. The methodological approach will be guided by historical-dialectical materialism in dialogue with black feminism, using the main research techniques, namely: bibliographic analysis and document analysis, giving priority to what black feminists have produced on the subject, and especially what mothers have to say to us. Content analysis was the technique chosen to analyze the research corpus. This dissertation discusses in section 2 Race and Gender in Brazilian Socio-Historical Formation the issues of race and gender as fundamental to understanding contemporary Brazil, exploring the impact of racism on the experience of black motherhood. In section 3, Interrupted Motherhood: Self- Organization and Intellectuality as a Strategy to Combat Lethal State Violence, we will address the war on drugs as a war on poor and black populations, and violence in Brazil's favela territories. We will also present the results of our research. The alarming and growing number of young people murdered by direct violence perpetrated by the Brazilian state places Bahia as the state with the highest murder rate. It affects not only the bodies that fall to the ground, but also entire families and communities. We consider here the systemic murder of black youth as an expression of the Brazilian state's policy of whitening and extermination which, contrary to what the hegemonic ideology claims, did not remain in the 20th century, but has been perfecting and updating its technologies of oppression. The results of the research pointed to the subversion of academic logic based on the movement's own publications, in which the production of knowledge is mediated by the shared experience of pain among the activistresearchers.