Mulheres que matam: universo imaginário do crime no feminino

Abstract

This work aims at clarifying the social representations associated with crime, especifically relation to murders commited by womem. The main objective is to clarify social meanings of the imaginary that are created around these actions e renewed bb women that kill. It also tries to understand social representations related to these crimes erected in the legal field. The women that kill present to the public the face of a woman who is a victim of illtreatment and social discrimination that put them in a frame of a culturally-built pattern of mother-woman, wife and housewife. These women acquire with their crimes social visibility reaching thus a public instance markin violence as a creation, a fonn of delivering themselves from a situation of frequent invisibility, sufferings and na undignified life. Un-noticed as authors of crimes by the legal field and socia11y-built to perfonn functions within the realm of the house, a place of passivity, the woman establishes with crime a new form of being a. woman: active subject, author of actions that go beyond the private worId. She plays, simultaneously the role of the gentle mothely-shaped housewife and the brave villainous "street-woman", ready to commit crimes. In this fashion the murder commited by the woman is seeing as the breaking with the feminine condition of the "servant" which leaves her out of the social activities and installs her in the condition of "subject" where she acquires public relevance even by means of a tortuous form as crime. As the reseach will be dealing with ral cases of women jailed for homicíde, from their own view point as well as from the representations created by other social agents, their violent actions will be related to their own search of freedom and autonomy.