Eleven months separate the brutal murder of the transvestite Dandara dos Santos from the cowardly murder of the black councilwoman Marielle Franco.
Dandara dos Santos was murdered in Fortaleza on February 15, 2017 by 12 people, seven adults and five teenagers, in a cowardly ritual, filmed and shared on social media.
Marielle Franco was shot dead inside her car, in the central region of Rio de Janeiro, around 9:30 pm on March 14, 2018, along with her driver Anderson Gomes.
They did not know each other, but they bore marks on their bodies that placed them as belonging to groups of “humans judged as disposable and superfluous” (Achille MBEMBE, 2012, p. 135), therefore likely to be murdered.
Confined to the terrain of generic brutality, I agree with the thought that power in post-colonial times takes the form of “necropolitics” (MBEMBE, 2012), since it advocates the death of those who are not able to fit in. of manipulative norms (Jaime Alonso CARAVACA-MORERA; Maria Itayra PADILHA, 2018) of white cis heterosexuality.
Dandara was killed for being a transvestite. Marielle for being black, lesbian, feminist and defender of human rights.
It is not a question here of scrutinizing who Dandara and Marielle were, but problematizing the value attributed to their lives by capitalist logic, where transphobia, racism and lesbophobia can be interpreted from the logic of necropolitics, since the lives of some people are considered more valuable than others.
Mbembe (2012) develops the concept of necropolitics from Michel Foucault's (2005) problematizations on biopower.
Osmundo Pinho (2008), homosexual, black, researcher and university professor, explains that biopower affects the collective body of populations and constitutes the power to manage collective life in the social body.
Foucault (2005, p. 304) then asks: “how can a power like this kill, if it is true that it is essentially about increasing life, prolonging its duration, multiplying its possibilities, diverting its accidents, or else to make up for your shortcomings?”
In this sense, racism, transphobia and lesbophobia begin to play a strategic role in this process and, thus, highlight the deviations “and negative attributes with the imputation of stigma, serving as a warning to the 'normal' that they should stay away from of the 'spoiled', 'impure', 'unworthy' and 'deservedly' excluded from the 'normal' society.” (Waléria MENEZES, 2002, p. 98).
Both racism and transphobia and lesbophobia were and continue to be used to reduce the subjects to whom they refer to what is interpreted as a defect.
Inscribed in a capitalist society, which attributes value to human existence through the “buying and selling of labor power at its most fundamental level” (Leomir Cardoso HILÁRIO, 2016, p. 205), subjects like Dandara and Marielle are considered superfluous and can naturally be excluded. That is, the political action of death is the appropriate political form for capitalism, even deciding who should and who should not die.
The murders of Dandara dos Santos and Marielle Franco followed this logic, albeit in different contexts.
1. The Assassins of Dandara
Dandara's transvestite gender identity was used to justify her murder, as it would be of lesser value when compared to normative cis heterosexuality,
Dandara was a white transvestite, poor, with low education, without a formal job or defined profession, and a resident of the outskirts of Fortaleza.
Its killers, 12 in total, are black and, like the victim, are also poor people, with low education, no defined profession and residents of the outskirts of Fortaleza.
There are many points that bring victims and murderers together and place them in a situation of extreme exclusion, subject to coercive actions by biopower. However, Dandara's transvestite gender identity was used to justify her murder, since this would be of lesser value when compared to normative cis heterosexuality , even if expressed in black, poor bodies and also liable to be affected by the policy of killability, or that is, of necropolitics.
I draw attention to the fact that even hegemonic masculinity is not a fixed attribute. This masculinity is constituted by contact with the other , demanding that hierarchical norms be updated. Thus, masculinities, black or white, use whiteness and cis heterosexuality to guarantee an uncontested supremacy of gender that operates in order to overcome the feminine, whether cis or trans.
The permanent search for the maintenance of this supremacy attacks, violent, mutilates, kills...
It kills transvestites in vulnerable situations like Dandara and women on the rise like Marielle Franco.
2. Who killed Marielle?
Investigations point to the involvement of militias formed by former police officers and powerful politicians, which is why the case remains unsolved.
This unanswered question, with an open-ended answer, reveals the necropolitics mentioned by Mbembe (2012), operating in the Brazilian State, which authorizes structural and institutional violence directed at people like Marielle with the deliberate intention of exterminating them.
Marielle challenged the logic of exclusion and, as a black, lesbian woman living in Complexo da Maré in Rio de Janeiro, managed to get a degree in sociology and be elected councilor and had real possibilities of being elected senator. Her social and political rise made her an even bigger target.
Evidently, the surveillance of her body, her actions and especially her political positions – since she was the voice of thousands of excluded people fighting for their rights – triggered the devices of necropolitics that ended with her execution.
Investigations point to the involvement of militias formed by former police officers and powerful politicians, which is why the case remains unsolved.
The very way in which the case has been conducted reveals an uncomfortable and compromising slowness that benefits the masterminds and perpetrators of the crime, which can be interpreted as a message to anyone, like Marielle, who dares to challenge the structures of power as they present themselves.
Although the execution took place in the center of Rio de Janeiro, no security camera, inexplicably, was able to record any images of the killers. Furthermore, the crime scene was not preserved , which according to specialists, compromised the work of the forensics and, the civil police took eight months to display a simple sketch that would be of the alleged criminal.
3. Some considerations
Dandara dos Santos and Marielle Franco were bold in constituting themselves as legal subjects and moved, each in their own way and with the tools at their disposal, structures presented as natural and immutable.
The fact that they defied the logic imposed by machismo, racism, classism and lesbo and transphobia resulted in their murders.
The arrest of the killers of Dandara was only possible thanks to the dimensions that the case took and was authorized, in part, by the logic of elimination imposed by capitalism and necropolitics, which treats the poorest strata of our society as less important and easily replaced .
These are lives that are worth less and need to be eliminated, either by death or by imprisonment. But it is still something new when it comes to murders of transvestites and transgender women, since, as a rule, regardless of the social class or racial affiliation of the murderers, most of the time, they remain unpunished and rarely go to trial.
The murder of Marielle Franco remains unsolved.
The slowness of the investigations, even in the face of pressure from a large part of Brazilian society and groups that fight for human rights in Brazil and abroad, reveal that their killers are part of a segment of society that deserves the protection of the State , because their lives are those considered important, even if they commit heinous crimes. Apparently, there is a deliberate attempt for the case to fall into oblivion and start to appear as another scandalous unsolved murder.
This does not mean that the police authorities do not have the competence to investigate, it seems that these authorities are not free to do so.
( • )
Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira. Black transvestite, PhD in Education from the Federal University of Paraná, professor, researches ethnic-racial relations, African and Afro-Brazilian art, gender and sexual diversity, works in the social movement of black men and women and in the LGBT movement.
Illustration Thállaty Braus Guilherme.
( • )
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
CARAVACA-MORERA, Jaime Alonso; PADILHA, Maria Itayra. Trans necropolitics: dialogues about the device of power, death and invisibility in contemporary times. Available at: <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S0104-07072018000200326&lng=pt&nrm=iso>. Accessed on 6 Mar. 2019.
FOUCAULT, Michael. In defense of society: course at the College de France (1975-1976). São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005.
HILÁRIO, Leomir Cardoso. From biopolitics to necropolitics: foucauldian variations on the periphery of capitalism. Sapere aude, Belo Horizonte, v. 7 - no. 12, p. 194-210, January / June 2016 - ISSN: 2177-6342.
MBEMBE, Achilles. Necropolitics, a critical review. In: GREGOR, Helena Chávez Mac (Org.). Aesthetics and violence: Necropolitics, militarization and weeping lives. Mexico: UNAM-MUAC, 2012, p. 130-139.
MENEZES, Waleria. Racial prejudice and its repercussions on the school institution. Journal of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, n. 147, Aug, 2002. Available at: <http://www.fundaj.gov.br>. Accessed on: 5 Sept. 2005.
PINE, Osmundo. Race relations and sexuality. In: OSMUNDO, Pinho; SANSONE, Livio (Eds.) Race: new anthropological perspectives. 2nd ed. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2008, p. 257-284.
