Violence between the Home and the Street: The Public/Private Boundary and the Social Construction of Gendered Violence in Southern Brazil

Building on critiques by feminists and by the sociology of violence literature of the separation between “street” and “domestic” violence, we investigate how actors involved in reproducing and managing violence classify spaces and situations as public (“street”) or private (“home”), and how the gendering of violence depends on this classification. More specifically, we analyze how young women incarcerated for violent acts and police officers who investigate murders of women narrate the violence that they encounter, in the context of Porto Alegre, Brazil. We find a common narrative about place, gender, and violence: the street as the space of genderless, (drug)market-related, and rational violence; and the home as the place of gendered, emotional violence. We argue that this framing reduces gender violence to emotional disputes within the family, erases the broader institutional sources of violence against women, and naturalizes violence in the “street,” signified as the space of drug markets and criminal activity, portraying it as unavoidable. This framing is particularly problematic concerning the experiences of Brazilian women who inhabit poor and disproportionately Black urban spaces.