Young female engagement in delinquency in south Brazil: Biographic and visual narratives

Young female engaging in delinquency in south Brazil: biographic and visual narratives Hermílio Santos (PUCRS, Brazil) hermilio@pucrs.br This paper analyses the interpretation of “life-world” of young females with direct experience with violence, i.e., that committed offences. It analyses how and why female adolescents are engaged in the “world of crime”, exploring not the elements usually discussed in the sociological literature concerning this issue – that means, the objective conditions of life of those youths –, but the subjective interpretation of the actors on the social context (analyses of the life-world). In opposition to the post-structuralist approach, that do not recognize to the subject any relevant role on the knowledge that could be obtained of the reality, the paper is based on biographic and visual narratives, and analyzes: a) how these youths narrates and interpret their biographies; b) the subjective mechanisms of meaning construction on the life-world, with special attention to the experience with violence, and c) the forms of subjective foundation on the belonging to their life-world. Here biography is understood as the description made by the individual themselves, of processes and experiences that extended through the life, that means, written or oral presentation of history of life. In this sense, biographies and biographic trajectories are not purely individual phenomena, but social ones, since they are made of specific sequences of isolated actions among the possible actions in the social world. The biographic narrative offers important elements for the analysis not only on the narratorxs life, but especially on the connections between the individual and his group or community, considering however that any narrative is an interpretation based on a specific biographic situation, according to Schutz. In this sense, the access to the experiences accumulated and consolidated in their biographies permits the analysis of the subjective interpretation of the actors.