Living without war? Local powers and gender relations in popular daily life

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the ef fects that the war promoted by the State against the Drug Traf fic produces in terms of gender in the daily life of families inhabiting the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro. By emphasizing the narratives of women, we consider that the gender relations are ‘made’ at the same time as they make the war making. By accompanying situations involving physical and moral ill treatment, threats and murders faced by women, we argue how crime, territory and violence are embedded in family and neighborhood relations. The temporality of war, lasting already 40 years, is read as a past woven in the intimacy of the relations and as a present always updated in the experiences of gender relations framed by the constant war.