Visibilidades marginais: performances midiáticas de membros de facções criminosas em plataformas digitais

Abstract

In a context marked by the intensification of urban criminal disputes and the increasing protagonism of digital platforms in mediating social life, this research investigates the media performances of members of urban gangs operating in the state of Bahia, Brazil, on YouTube. Drawing on the analysis of 90 videos published on the platform between 2023 and 2024, the dissertation seeks to understand how these enactments produce specific regimes of visibility, legitimacy, and belonging, while simultaneously reconfiguring symbolic codes of violence and power. The study adopts a performative framework, articulating the theoretical contributions of Erving Goffman, Richard Schechner, and Diana Taylor, in dialogue with emerging research on digital gangs and the Brazilian literature on crime, criminality, and organized criminal formations. It argues that the videos under analysis are not mere records of violence, but rather constitute organized media actions that operate as devices of symbolic recognition in territories marked by material inequality, stigmatization, and state and non-state forms of control. YouTube is approached both as stage and as territory: a space in which gang roles, loyalty, and confrontation are dramatized, but also a regulatory environment shaped by algorithms, moderation guidelines, and platform business models that condition the public display of such performances. Methodologically, the study combines non-participant observation, web scraping, thematic and performative analysis, with particular attention to the visual, interactional, and technological dimensions of the scenes. The media performances of urban gang actors are examined through three interrelated axes: the protagonists on screen, their bodily gestures and symbolic markers; the channel operators, whose curatorial and editing practices frame the content; and the audience, whose comments and interactions constitute part of the performative circuit. The central hypothesis sustains that these actors mobilize the platform as a strategic resource for producing visibility and as a language of belonging and contestation, converting risk into communicational capital. By shifting the analytical focus from criminal structures to mediated performances, from prisons to videos, the dissertation contributes to a rethinking of contemporary forms of criminal agency, highlighting their media, technological, and symbolic mediations. "Finally, the study interrogates the ethical and political limits of representing violence, seeking not to aestheticize the analyzed images, but to understand them as situated social practices with concrete effects on ways of living, appearing, and dying in the peripheral territories of Salvador.