'I Did What I Had to Do': Loyalty and Sacrifice in Girls' Narratives of Homicide in Southern Brazil.

This paper examines how criminalized teenage girls who have committed homicide reconcile violent practices with self-conceptions of femininity in their personal narratives. Data come from 13 biographical interviews with adolescent girls incarcerated in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Drawing from Bourdieusian theory and narrative criminology, I examine how gendered social structures shape how girls produce intelligible and morally coherent accounts of their crimes. I found that girls share a narrative habitus that allows for three different frames to make sense of violence: violence as a gendered resource, as a gendered failure and as a gendered dilemma. This paper contributes to a growing feminist narrative criminology that investigates how personal narratives of violence are embedded in gendered social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]