Da materialidade dos corpos à materialidade do crime: A materialização da pornografia infantil em investigações policiais

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss how the bodies that support the construction of the materiality of "crimes of child pornography" are constructed/ materialized in the context of investigative police work. Assuming that there is no pre-discursive bodily reality upon which social construction is realized, I suggest that the analytical operations carried out in relation to sex/gender may be utilized to understand the artificiality of the division between physiological and social sexual maturity (puberty). In a wider sense, it can be used to interpret the process of visually differentiating and identifying bodies as physical attributes of age. These conceptual formulations gain materiality in the ethnographic description of the analyses carried out by police officers, who define the images that can be classified as being "pornographic" and the bodies which can be identified as "children", making explicit how a detective-eye reciprocally constitutes the materiality of crime and the materiality of bodies, thereby producing the bodies it governs.