Corpos matáveis: uma arqueogenealogia de assassinatos de travestis e transexuais na imprensa maranhense

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes, from an archaeogenealogical perspective, the discursive production of travestis and transsexual women as killable subjectivities in journalistic statements about their murders in the media of the state of Maranhão, understanding such production as an effect of historically situated processes of subjectivation. It is organized around the problematization of the press as an operator of the dispositif of killability (or apparatus of killability), a concept proposed in this dissertation through the articulation of Agamben's expanded apparatus and his notions of homo sacer and bare life; Mbembe's necropolitics; and Butler's ungrievable lives. In this trajectory, we seek to understand the ways in which news routines, newsworthiness crieteria and source hierarchies produce effects of truth that naturalize violence against dissident bodies and position them outside the field of recognizability and grievability. The corpus comprises 12 digital news articles from the state of Maranhão, published between 2020 and 2023, with priority given to the newspaper O Imparcial, alongside a broader archive of 88 articles used for the historicization of discourse and comparative analysis across periods. The analysis mobilizes Foucauldian categories (discourse, statement, discursive formation, dispositif, interdiction and archive) in dialogue with Butler's gender performativity and norms of recognition, Preciado's pharmacopornopolitics, and Mbembe's necropolitics. The findings reveal three historical operators of the dispositif of killability (the church, medicine and the media), describe how crime journalism fabricates killable bodies through the serial regularity of dehumanizing frames, and identify, in the breaches of the archive, counter-hegemonic discursive practices that challenge normative regimes and open other possibilities of existence for LGBTQI+ bodies.