“Girls Calculate Everything”: Economic Precarity, Gendered Violence, and Illicit Drug Markets in Criminalized Girls’ Survival Narratives

How do the inner dynamics of illegal drug markets shape the lives of young women at the global peripheries of capitalism? In Global South countries like Brazil, neoliberal economic policies have given rise to increasingly precarious labor markets. The transnational War on Drugs has led to the expansion of militarized security and the growth of violent—and increasingly profitable—illegal markets. Women and girls in South America, particularly at the bottom of the cocaine economy, have borne the brunt of these interconnected historical processes. The feminization of poverty and the expansion of illicit markets have combined to produce new feminized circuits of survival and forms of criminalization. These processes speak to two long-standing, interconnected debates in the literature on gender and crime: how to theorize (i) the relationship between victimization, offending, and criminalization and (ii) women’s agency in criminalized settings. In this paper, I demonstrate (i) how transnational illicit economies generate new survival strategies for women in the peripheries of global capitalism and (ii) how these same strategies contribute to women’s heightened exposure to interpersonal and state violence. I analyze how gendered, racialized, and economic structures map onto the inner dynamics of illicit drug economies and, in turn, shape individual, collective, and legal narratives of women’s crime and violence. To do so, I examine (i) 34 biographical narratives of criminalized young women collected in 2016 and 2023-2024, and (ii) 40 judicial documents related to the accusations and sentencing of young women for homicide, robbery-murder, drug trafficking, and robbery between 2014 and 2023.