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• 1 2023-11-26T08:55:14-08:00 The Invisible Visibility: An Examination of Media Portrayals of A Feminicide Victim in Brazil by Isabella Villa Real Seabra 33 plain 2024-02-01T07:30:19-08:00

  Introduction

  The archive plays an important role in informing and preserving the histories of events and experiences. In the context of feminicides, the archive can also be a site of violence and erasure. The goal of this project is to examine how feminicide is portrayed by the media in Brazil through the lens of archival, affective, and memory studies. By looking at the intersection of feminicide with visual culture, this project hopes to construct a new path to understanding the ways in which feminicide is remembered, represented, and contested. In other words, what are the complex ways in which visibility, invisibility, and memory work and are at play in media representations of feminicide? Specifically, I will analyze the media coverage of Aída Curi's murder in 1958 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in comparison to how the media portrayed that same murder in a true crime TV series episode in 2004. Whose gaze is being presented at both of these moments? How does it change?
  
  Aida’s family filed a lawsuit for the “Right to be Forgotten” after the 2004 episode. The Supreme Court denied this right due to the constitutionally established fundamental duty of solidarity between generations. Still, what does her family ask of us, as spectators? How can we respect both the family wishes and the press’ freedom of speech? Lastly, this essay proposes devisualization as a methodological framework for remembering victims of feminicide. In doing so, the hope is to deconstruct the archive and then rebuild it as a site of care and respect. 

  The Aída Curi Case

  In topics such as feminicide, it is critical to understand the ways in which the theoretical explorations of care within feminist studies intersect with archival work. Looking at the archives through the lens of care incites a bigger attention to the ethical responsibilities and affective dimensions of archival. The Aída Curi Case, from 1958, serves as a great example of why it is important to approach the archive with care and empathy.
   

  Original Media Coverage (1958)

  In 1958, when Aída was 18 years old, she was forcibly taken to the top of a building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, where she was tortured for 30 minutes by three different young men. Then, she was thrown off the edge of the building by the attackers in a failed forensic countermeasure that attempted to stage a suicide. Extensive mediatic coverage of the case has uncovered multiple more details of the crime. However, in an attempt to remain truthful to the devisualization methodology, I refuse to further attach violence to the memory of Aída and will therefore not include any visual material nor any graphic description of it. Rather, this essay questions the very use of these images in the first place. 
  
  The overexposure of the case did not occur because the newspapers cared about Aída’s death. In reality, her case served as a tool on a bigger argument over societal norms. When the murder first took place, Brazilian society was going through an “Americanization,” inspired by James Dean in the movie “Rebel Without a Cause.”   The “juventude transviada,” also known as the wayward youth, was seen as a threat to the good costumes and values of the conservative majorly catholic Brazilian society.  Aída was on the other end of the spectrum. A devoted catholic, Aída became a symbol of purity, morals, and values. Her image was constructed to represent everything that the juventude transviada was not. This sanctification of Aída was common among newspapers. 
  
  Furthermore, news vehicles ignored the forensic evidence in order to relate Aída more closely to a saint-like figure. Although forensic experts concluded that Miss Curi was indeed thrown off the building, many newspapers continued to publicize news stating that she had thrown herself. They did so because they were arguing that Aída threw herself off of the building in order to protect her honor. They often wrote about how she preferred to sacrifice herself rather than her honor. The emphasis that news vehicles gave to this shows that their main interest rely on her honor and morals rather than her life. 
  
  The newspapers used this saint-like image to oppose the juventude transviada. Many of the newspaper articles directly created an opposition between these two symbols, stating things like: “Aída Curi: Killed by the Lost Youth.” In using her death as a pawn in a battle, newspapers once again demonstrate their lack of care when talking about Aída. 

  "Linha Direta" Episode (2004)

  Even though it has been over 65 years since Aída was murdered, her family is still dealing with the overexposure of her death. In 2006, Monsignor Mauricio Curi, Aída’s brother, released a statement, on behalf of the Curi family, retelling the story of the crime and its aftermath from their perspective and based on official evidence. This was prompted by the exhibition, in 2004, of a reenactment of the crime by a popular true crime TV show from Globo, Brazil’s communications giant. 
  
  The episode starts by giving a bit of context about the year 1958 and its significant events in Brazil. It highlights the launch of the first car in the country and the emergence of Bossa Nova as a music genre. Most importantly, it talks about one of Brazil’s greatest achievements at the time: winning the soccer World Cup for the first time. Amidst the joy and triumph, a tragedy strikes with the death of Aída Curi. As Mário Zagallo, a player in the World Cup and one of the first interviewees of the episode says “It was a sad day in the middle of a glorious year.”  ,  It then announces the episode with the song “Strange Little Girl” by The Stranglers and a collage of scenes from the episode. The episode briefly introduces Aída as a young woman who had grown up in a devout Catholic family and had become a role model for many of her school colleagues. 
  
  “Aída Curi, a young woman that thought about being a nun and died a victim of her own naiveté. She didn’t notice the malice of her murdered and paid [for it] with her own life,” said the host.  Through dramatization, the episode re-enacts Aída’s growing up and then focuses on the day in which she was murdered. With a romantic song in the background, the episode re-creates its own version of Aída’s first contact with her murderers. It constructs a scenario where Aída was charmed and voluntarily went to one of the offender’s apartment buildings with him, something that evidence has proven not to be true. In reality, multiple witnesses testify that they heard Aída’s screams as she was dragged to the building and then to the elevator. 
  
  Back in the episode, the host announces, at 20 minutes and 40 seconds, that the show will start to show the official version of the prosecution. As a journalistic show, shouldn’t all that is shown be based on evidence? Why are we only seeing the official version when the episode is more than halfway through? Even though the episode supposedly purports to represent the version of the prosecution, it moves to show us a romanticized version of Aída and one of her murderers embraced looking at the ocean view, something that did not happen. 
  
  The episode re-creates the violence that Aída went through in much lighter and less detailed version. It minimizes Aída’s struggle to her simply passing out, when forensic authorities have already established that she only passed out due to her intense resistance to the 30 minutes of torture she went through. Then, the program shows the murderers throwing Aída off of the building, something that is indeed accurate to what really happened. The episode gives a brief overview of the trials of the case and then moves to show where her murderers are in present moment of the episode (2004).  
  
  The Curi family sued the TV Globo enterprises for resurfacing their trauma and the stigma attached to the Curi name. Specifically, their case was based on the argument of the “right to be forgotten."

  The Right to be Forgotten

  The "right to be forgotten" in Brazilian law deals with the removal of outdated or misleading information that may cause harm or affect a person’s reputation. The scope of this right includes digital records as well as physical archives. The law was first introduced in Brazil in 2014 as part of the Internet Bill of Rights. It grants citizens the right to request the removal of certain information from digital sources that are deemed harmful or irrelevant. Its relationship to freedom of expression and the right to access information has been the subject of debate, with some arguing that it may infringe on these rights The Aida Curi case brought this debate to light in the recent years. The case spent years within the criminal justice system, and in 2021, the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil decided that the argued “right to be forgotten” was unconstitutional based on the constitutionally established fundamental duty of solidarity among generations. 
  
  At its core, the fundamental duty of solidarity among generations is about knowledge transmission and access to information. It requires members of a generation to preserve its archive so that the future generation can learn and benefit from it. In the Aida Curi case, it means that the future generations must be able to access reports and information about what happened. Shouldn’t our duty then be to accurately represent the past so that the truthful information is given to the new generation? The 2004 episode was an inaccurate and deeply romanticized version of what happened. It served only to spread baseless information that further harmed Aída and her family.
  
  Moving beyond the final decision of the court, this case serves perfectly to re-emphasize how critical it is for one to be attentive when looking at the archive. Archival work of sensitive subjects, such as feminicide, can function as both a way of promoting awareness and as a re-traumatizing mechanism that can also contribute to the perpetuation of harmful narratives. The case has exposed the risks associated with rarefying experiences into mere listings of facts in unsympathetic documents and underlines the significance of being aware of the impact individual narratives may have beyond the single stories they represent.

  Desvisualization

  The concept of “care in/through the archives” requires us to rethink our archival practices, encouraging a development of alternative and community-centered approaches to the archive. One of the alternative ways of engaging with the archive is the “devisualization” methodology. 
  
  Was this mediatic coverage ever about Aída? As Lata Mani's writings on Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India comes to a key conclusion, debates on tradition place women as the grounds of the discussion rather than the agents of discourse.

  Tradition was thus not the ground on which the status of woman was being contested. Rather the reverse was true : women in fact became the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated. What was at stake was not women but tradition. Thus it is no wonder that even reading against the grain of a discourse ostensibly about women, one learns so little about them. To repeat an earlier formulation: neither subject, nor object, but ground — such is the status of women in the discourse on sati.

  In the context of feminicide, devisualization can be a powerful tool for approaching the archive. In response to the painful materials often circulated about feminicide, devisualization is a commitment to livability beyond the archives of mere death and violence. It is important to say that the devisualization of feminicide is not about erasing the lives of those killed; it is about humanizing them. It is about remembering them for their lives rather than their deaths.
  
  At its core, devisualization is both a methodological process and processing. Its purpose is to unprivilege the image from its visual registers in favor of written and/or oral renarration that is deliberately and intentionally incomplete. The goals of devisualization is to prioritize describing the image rather than showing it, to require us to sit with incomplete archives and their “absences,” and to implicate the historian in the archive. It complicates encounters with the archive by imagining what it could look like otherwise, refusing extraction and circulation so that the silences produced can occupy us.  It serves as an alternative historiographical approach that acknowledges painful pasts without attempting to fix them, sits in absences without working to fill them, and remembers those now gone in ways that foregrounds their once-liveliness vs their present death and continued afterlife.  
  
  In this sense, the Aída Curi case can also provide an example of what a devisualization of the archive can look like in practice. In the aftermath of Aída’s death and the exhibition of the true crime TV Show episode, her family, in especial her brother Mauricio, developed a website that is dedicated to the memory of Aída.  It creates an archive of letters, statements, and photographs focused on showing Aída’s life. In doing so, it starts to question the historical overexposure of the case and the blatant mediatic focus on Aída’s death in direct opposition to her life. Some of the materials on the website are recovered interviews with Aída’s middle school professors and childhood photos.  In this beautiful reconstruction of her life, Aída’s family is engaging with the archive in what can be seen as a devisualization practice. 
  
  Different from the context of slavery that requires the use of critical fabulation tools, the archives of feminicide cases in Brazil do not pose the challenge of namelessness of the dead.  Rather, the problems lie on the persistence to share only the violent reports and images of their deaths. Why is such painful and violent knowledge-making rendered the legitimate means of understanding feminicide? Isn’t the murder itself enough?  This is where devisualization enters. It refuses to make our first knowledge of the victims of feminicide to be violence and death.
  
  In order to understand the insistence on the circulation of violent and painful representations of feminicide, we can turn to affective theory. The core question here lies within the complex relationship between visual representations of violence and the affective responses they evoke. The application of affective theory is rooted in the understanding of affect as embedded within broader social, cultural, and political contexts rather than only individual experiences.  By understanding affect as both a collective and an individual experience, we can lay out a theoretical basis of the reasoning behind the repetitive use of violent representations in the media. 
  
  Images of violence often generate strong affective responses. As argued by Sontag, the affects usually associated with visual representations of violence range from anger and fear to empathy and compassion.  Furthermore, Sara Ahmed writes on how affective theory can be used to highlight the complex ways in which images of violence can be used to both reinforce and challenge the dominant cultural norms, social structures, and power dynamics.  However, it is hard to predict with precision what kind of affect will be produced, especially when images are presented isolated. Looking at the original newspapers’ articles from the Aída Curi Case, the texts and headlines that accompany the images serve to set the tone and illuminate what kind of response the writers were expecting from the audience. 
  
  An important point that affect theory points out is that visual representations of violence can have both negative and positive consequences on the viewers. On one hand, it can generate empathy, compassion, and indignation, all of which can drive individuals and communities together in name of resistance and demands of social change.  On the other hand, the constancy at which visual representations of violence are presented to the public, can have the opposite effect, and desensitize viewers to the suffering of others.

  Repercussions

  The right to be forgotten, visual culture, and memory studies have become increasingly important in contemporary discussions of historical trauma and collective memory. The Aida Curi case highlights the need for commemoration and remembrance in the ongoing pursuits of social justice movements. Despite the passage of time, the case continues to inspire social and cultural awareness through artistic depictions and public memorials. By revisiting the story of Aida Curi, we can understand not only the impact of tragic events on communities but also the importance of visual and media culture in shaping collective memory. 
  
  Furthermore, the cultural impact of the case was far-reaching and profound. The excessive media coverage of the crime marked a turning point for feminist activism in Brazil and Latin America. It illuminated the rampant disregard for female bodies and catalyzed a social movement that continues today. The case itself has become enshrined as a symbol of resistance and hope for those who seek to end gender-based violence. The memorials and commemorations that now exist serve as reminders of the tragedy and the work that remains to be done. In this way, the Aida Curi case continues to inspire critical engagement with issues of justice, memory, and visual culture.
  
  The Aida Curi case is an example of how collective remembrance can shape the trajectory of social justice movements. By understanding histories of tragedy and oppression, societies can work towards a more just and equitable future. Visual and media culture plays a critical role in shaping how communities come to understand these events and their significance. In this sense, the story of Aida Curi can serve as a poignant reminder of the past and a call to action for the present. It forces us to seriously face the imperative to remember with care, both as individuals and a society.

  Conclusion

  Overall, adopting devisualization as a methodology for looking at the issue of feminicide in Brazil provides us with an alternative way of working with archives. Through its intersections with affective and visual theories, the process and processing of devisualization requires us to challenge the existing ways of looking at archives. In the context of feminicide, devisualizing the archive poses itself as a practice of healing and resistance. By refusing to excavate the afterlife for the mourning practices of the living, we allow for the memory of the women victims of feminicide to stay focused on their lives rather than their deaths.
  
  The case of Aída Curi serves as a great example for understanding what devisualizing the archive looks like in practice. For almost 65 years, society and the media have perpetuated the violence of Aída’s death. In response to the misrepresented narratives about the case and repeated re-traumatization they were subjected to, the Curi family created a repository of memories and personal accounts of the crime. In their own ways, they devisualized the archives of the tragedy that played and plays such an important role in their lives. Through their work, we are able to see the affects produced by the devisualization of the archive and read their own accounts of what that process was like to them.

  References

  Condé, João. “James Dean em Copacabana: a invenção da ‘juventude transviada’ carioca nos anos 1950.” História da Ditadura, July 18, 2020. https://www.historiadaditadura.com.br/post/james-dean-em-copacabana-a-invenção-da-juventude-transviada-carioca-nos-anos-1950.
  
  “Linha Direta - Justiça: Aída Curi.” SDTV (480i). Linha Direta. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Rede Globo de Televisão, April 29, 2004. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EaMgW9-no&t=302s.
  
  Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions : The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998. http://archive.org/details/contentioustradi0000mani.
  
  Rebel Without a Cause. CinemaScope, Coming-of-age romantic drama. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955.
  
  Santos, Lidia Noemia Silva dos. “A invenção da juventude transviada no Brasil (1950-1970).” Doutorado em História, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2013. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/12810.
  
  Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.