Criminalizable Masculinities: Gender in the Trenches of the War on Drugs

Abstract

This essay discusses the relationship between masculinities, coloniality and anti-drug policy in Brazil, through the articulation between critical studies on anti-drug policy, gender and masculinity studies, queer/kuir theory and decolonial studies. Through critical analysis of the massive criminalization of black men promoted by the rhetoric of involvement in drug trafficking, we argue that anti-drug policy is an expression of coloniality and a gender technology that regulates the field of emergence and recognition of identities through the War on Drugs. In view of this, we conceptualize the notion of criminalizable masculinities, in reference to the racialized experience of gender produced through criminalization processes.