Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Central-West Brazil, this paper aims to problematize common sense and official positions on the status of victim/perpetrator of violence, assuming the point of view of paradoxical subject making processes among returnees of trafficking in persons.

Paper long abstract:

As part of a transnational and multi-sited research on the discursive practices of the human trafficking paradigm, this paper is based, in particular, on ethnographic fieldwork in Central-West Brazil and it seeks to explore the ambiguity permeating the constructions and experiences of violence amongst returnees of trafficking in persons (TIP). Violence is considered as a thick arena-concept through which different positionings and conceptions can be given voice, showing the dynamic plurivocality of its construction and its incidence in defining the subject position of the victim of TIP. Without disregarding a macro perspective locating social actors inside realities of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1998), structural violence (Farmer 1997), invisible violence (Žižek 2007) and social suffering (Das et alii. 1997), nonetheless subjectivity constitutes the key interpretative tool. It is indeed assumed the standpoint of the paradoxical process of subjection between subject making and subordination (Butler 1997), where the experience of violence is taken as both empowering and disempowering. Suffering associated to violence is considered relational and transformative: it is crucial in gaining community and social recognition and inclusion on the part of multi-positioned, desiring and emotional subjectivites. The aim is to problematize common sense and official positions on the relatively recent status of "victim of violence", exploring the (re)generative and empowering force of this last one. Never the less, the limits of post-trafficking subjects' creativity and agency in search of social inclusion, through processes of sense-making and local worlds re-inhabiting, are reflected on.