Human rights in dispute

narrating vulnerability in Brazil through images of suffering (from 1992 to 2022)

Abstract

This research project aims to deal at the narrative level with images of suffering, which circulate through the most diverse media, such as “witnesses of vulnerability” and disputes around Human Rights in Brazil. The intention is to enter into what Michel Foucault called the diagnosis of the present, turning to problematizations as attitudes that do not start from determined historical clippings, but from the relationship with the present. Thus, considering that since 1992 the Pact of San José of Costa Rica has been in force in Brazil - which delimits several rights focused on the theme of life and its preservation -, we will consider that the images of suffering constitute historical narratives of the practices of violation of human rights in our country. In this sense, in the light of a genealogical perspective, we can understand that the images of suffering that circulate (of torture, of murders) show us which lives are exposed to vulnerabilities, which bodies become abject. Nevertheless, we will analyze some of these images of suffering, among them: the murder of the indigenous Galdino de Jesus (1997), the murder of the missionary Dorothy Stang (2005), the murder of the transvestite Dandara dos Santos (2017), the Massacre in the community of Jacarezinho (2021), the murder of Congolese Moïse Kabagambe (2022) and the murder of Genivaldo de Jesus Santos (2022). For the elaboration of this research we will follow some theoretical perspectives. About the concept of Vulnerability we will use what is in the thought of the American philosopher Judith Butler (1955). When talking about images of suffering, we will follow two theoretical lines: that of the American essayist Susan Sontag (1933 -2004) and that of the French historian Georges Didi-Huberman (1953).