A vida em rebelião: histórias de jovens em conflito com a lei

Abstract

This research is about young infractors in the Brazilian context, where conflict and criminality, violence and protest very often become indistinguishable. We have chosen the rebellions led by intemees at Febem-SP as a privileged material for the analysis of this "indistinguishability", both in their deadlocks and in their transforming power. The young interenees' point of view was prioritized in the construction of a narrative on the rebellions, so that the singular processes of resistance and their multiple significations could be assessed. The paradox which emerged from the intemees speeches, exemplified in the sentence "we are sentenced to rebellion", reveals that rebellion is in this intermediate space between insubordination and institutional capture, on the threshold between exclusion and inclusion, in-between the fact and the law. It is the form of resistance through which the adolescents respond to the logic of power present in the "Pebem system" - this curious conjugation of repressive, disciplinal, biopolitical and thanatopolitical mechanisms. The research also delineates the peculiar way of subjectification of these young internees: a paradoxal combination of life and death, utopianism and limit, project and finiteness; a hyper-realistic life, a kind of direct, concrete, dramatic and corporeal existential experience of reality. Hyper-realism seems to configurate a strategy of subjectification that faces up to thanatopolitics, allowing for the processing of violence, and producing communicative effects by connecting young infractors to the contemporaneous;I ways of the media and to social struggle. In questioning the status of rebellion with theoretical instruments picked up in Poucault, Deleuze-Guattari and in the law, the discussion on that which current social beliefs translate in terms of criminality is reopened, and the "rebellions af youth" are repositioned in their strategic dimension of creation of new social ordinances