Dispositivo patriarcal de violência jurídica contra a mulher: o caso Mariana Ferrer

Abstract

This research has found and related the lines between patriarchy, dispositif, and legal violence in Brazil. For this, we analyzed the discursive events of the Mariana Ferrer Case, a rape trial. This case has become notorious for Brazilian feminist and legal history due to three reasons: i) in 2020, The Intercept Brazil website published an article about the harassment suffered by Mariana Ferrer by Cláudio Gastão, defense lawyer for André Aranha; ii) for the justification of acquitting the defendant for “unintentional rape” by Judge Rudson Marcos and iii) for the creation of the Mariana Ferrer Law (14.245/21) which aims to restrain legal harassment of the victim during a legal audience. In this way, we used the following question that motivated the research: is legal violence against women a type of strategy made possible by the functioning of a patriarchal dispositif, which models and re-elaborates subjectivities asymmetrically through practices and discursive battles around of power, knowledge and foci of resistance which, in turn, have the function of calibrating and reorienting the lens and the exercise of this dispositif? In order to answer our question, we resorted to empirical material generated through internet searches on the Mariana Ferrer Case. We used two audiences available on the internet (cf. DESINTERCEPT, 2020; ESTADÃO, 2020) and two other videos that together sum up to more than five hours of audiovisual material through which we produced 27 analytical excerpts. From the typographic material, we used several discursive genres: tweets, posts, judge's sentence, Bill 5.096/2020, among others. From these, we produced 17 excerpts. The generated material is complex and heterogeneous. For justification, we used the notion of patriarchy (PATEMAN, 1993; SAFFIOTTI, 2015), discourse (FOUCAULT, 2020), device (AGAMBEN, 2005; FOUCAULT, 2007g), subject (BUTLER, 1997; 2002; 2019b; FOUCAULT, 2014c; 2019) and violence (ŽIŽEK, 2014). We conclude that patriarchy is a dispositif with heterogeneous, co-opting and capillary strategies in the various discourse practices. The legal violence against Mariana Ferrer is part of the strategies that maintain the dispositif that needs to be updated via statements of its occurrence. We identified some points of cohesion between the discursive practices of the dispositif: i) the defense lawyer used three violent and vexatious strategies against Mariana Ferrer (Nymphetage, Hoaxing and Legal Opposition); ii) through the defendant's statements, we pointed out the occurrence of five patriarchal strategies used (Mariana's Agencying; Defendant's Disagencying; Co-Agencying and Agencying for specific practices); iii) in the sentence, the judge justifies the acquittal for “unintentional rape” and triggers a Rape Label in which he assesses the veracity of the performance of a raped woman by the way she walks; iv) pernegation is a substantial concept we have come up with to the analysis of “unintentional rape”. However, we also conclude that the power relationship of Mariana Ferrer's agency was able to mobilize Brazilian society on rape and legal violence. This mobilization forces the patriarchal device to calibrate its exercise.