As práticas educativas do medo e os discursos sobre crimes de feminicídio na Paraíba: o caso Valdemarina Zominho e Maria Helena Freitas (1972-1996)

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the legal and journalistic discourses built on two crimes of violence committed against women, namely Valdemarina Zominho, in 1972 and Maria Helena Cruz de Freitas, in 1986. Although the murders occurred respectively in these years, the time frame of this thesis begins in 1972, as it was the date of the first case, and ends in 1996, the date of the last record found in the Court of Justice of Paraíba regarding the Maria Helena case. Spatially, I took the geography of Paraíba as a focus, not only because the crimes took place in the cities of Santa Rita and João Pessoa, but because the speeches produced and published in newspapers circulated throughout the various cities in the state. Although the murders of women were considered homicides at the time, I treat them in this text as feminicides, due to a political and fighting stance. Some conceptual categories were fundamental to understanding the theme and writing this text: feminicide, based on Izabel Gomes (2018) who dealt with violence committed against women due to their gender condition, in this case, in its most violent form, death; discourse in its forms of regularity, understood by Michel Foucault (2010) as possessing order, correlations, positions and functionings, linked and hierarchical transformations; regime of truth, thought of by Foucault (2009) as models of discourses produced and put into activity as true, in general, elaborated by institutions as a result of power and widely disseminated through so-called educational instances. I defend as a thesis argument the production of two distinct educational movements: an educational practice of fear imposed on women based on the discourses produced about the crimes of feminicide; and the production of movements of resistance to speeches about these crimes and against the impunity of the defendants. These movements were created from a cruel educational practice that I call the pedagogy of fear, a form of power full of devices capable of training bodies to historically agreed hegemonic machismo, and, sometimes, silently as an “agreement between gentlemen” who direct the institutions. Methodologically, I used Foucauldian discourse analysis to problematize how discursive statements were constructed as regimes of truth capable of educating, intimidating, punishing and absolving individuals who in this story defended the machismo pact, as well as, it was possible to perceive the regularities discursive forms of resistance. The historical sources collected and analyzed made up the archive, which according to Michel Foucault (2010) is the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of the statement as singular events not necessarily written in linearity but that are composed of each other in relationships multiple. Therefore, in this file, I gathered news published in the newspapers A União, O Norte, Correio da Paraíba and Diário da Borborema, the criminal proceedings of the Valdemarina Zominho case and other statements produced around the cases. It is concluded that the pedagogy of fear functioned as an educational practice capable of training women's bodies and minds according to the logic of hegemonic machismo, responsible for violating those who broke the rule, as well as creating demonstrations of struggle and resistance to this regime of truth through self-techniques.