(Re)pensando a epistemologia feminista na análise da violência contra a mulher: uma aproximação com a criminologia crítica.

Abstract

This academic work is a critical review of studies on violence against women undertaken by the american radical feminism and the approaches influenced by this. The research aims to analyze the theoretical framework used on the interpretation about violence in heterosexual relationships, considering the hypothesis that some of its assumptions are wrong. Problem areas found in American traditional theory revolved mainly around three issues. First, its simplistic and reductionist analysis, which summarizes the explanation of violence to gender. Second, its essentialist and deterministic conception of attributes related to men and to their sexuality, which gives them an insurmountable violent nature. Third, the strategy to struggle against violence lately reduced to criminalization and punishment. Such misconceptions reflect their adoption of the old etiological paradigm in criminological considerations made by this current, which has reverberated in different feminist theories and in political activism. In contrast, this work proposes a feminist approach to compose a unit with the critical criminology, that is, to make an interpretation of violence contextualized historically free of essentialism and committed to human emancipation forward to the various mechanisms of oppression.