Woof of care on the thresholds of life and death: violence, gender and time in the peripheries of the city of São Paulo

Abstract

In this text, I deal with the effects of violence resulting from wars involving men from the State and the crime that falls on families living on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo. I demonstrate that the impacts go far beyond the directly victimized bodies, interfering with family and neighborhood relationships, a situation maintained over time. I argue that violence, absorbed by ordinary life, is experienced and faced not only along the lines of race and social class, but also that of gender. While men are directly involved in conflicts over the control of territories produced by necropolitics – being, therefore, the direct victims and perpetrators of homicides, assaults and arrests– , it is women who bear the pain of loss, financial burden and emotional care accumulated by the responsibility required by those who are alive and by the daily task of (re)building devastated worlds. Without asserting gender dichotomies, it aims to demonstrate how the infiltration of violence in ordinary life produces genderified territories and subjectivities. Finally, Finally, I defend that agencies and strategies in everyday life carried out by women to maintain life are also productive dimensions of these territories, deeply anchored in female experiences related to the hard, muted and creative work of care.