This doctoral dissertation analyses the sense-making processes of homicide and physical violence amongst cisgender men (aged 18-32) who caused the death of other men during fights and confrontations in Metropolitan Buenos Aires between 2000 and 2020. Drawing upon a literature review of homicide perpetrators in five thematic areas (revolving around biographies, meanings, experiences, masculinities and accounts), this study fills a research gap in the lethal violence field: the meanings conveyed by homicide perpetrators. In order to inquire about their life stories, the analysis is based on theories and concepts of the social studies of violence, masculinities studies and narrative theory.
A qualitative, biographical and collaborative methodology was employed, framed in a hermeneutic-narrative perspective. The fieldwork consisted of 62 narrative interviews, co-constructed life lines and participant observations in prison and residences of the interviewees. Based on a convenience sampling strategy, twenty biographical cases were reconstructed. The corpus was analysed with an inductive process of thematic coding and hermeneutic case reconstruction. The analysis considered the thematisation, sequencing and structuration of the stories.
The results of the thesis are organised in three main domains of the violent death sense-making processes: stories about their biographical backgrounds, experiential-situational dynamics of the homicides, and explanatory accounts of the event. First, the analysis of biographical turning-points and lay theories about their own lives indicates a stoic interpretation of their worldviews: a rationality at hand to give meaning to themselves and their lived experiences, their interlocutors and, consequently, experienced and performed violence. The positive appraisal of painful experiences is an essential element of this rationality. The topics and events which are positively valued vary in relation to their trajectories and social networks: namely, narratives of marginalised young men illustrate that the homicide they committed does not imply per se a turning-point and that, simultaneously, being imprisoned can be experienced as a biographical opportunity.
Second, from the analysis of the experience of killing (their emotions, ways of perceiving the opponent and the audiences) three experiential axes emerged, which are relevant in the situational construction of the self: evaluation, threat and promotion. A phenomenological model was designed to explain how these elements interact, enabling the performance of violence. Thus, this model describes the emotional pathways around confrontational fear and tension, allowing men to “successfully” kill. The “inevitability” of the aggression and the defence of the self are two core aspects that emerged in the narrated situations. The concept of viscerality is put forward to describe an experience that goes beyond the naturalisation of violence, indicates “doing gender” performance and highlights the bodily dimension of physical confrontations amongst men.
Third, eight narrative explanations about the homicides were identified: “rebel”, “affected”, “fool”, “either he or me”, “repeating the story”, “gang”, “betrayed” and “victim.” These scripts use different narrative logics to incorporate, exclude, highlight or silence various aspects of these lives and their contexts. The accounts are structured around an explanatory locus (individual-collective) and their perspectives on agency and ontology of change (capacity-no capacity). The elements comprised in these accounts (life normality-abnormality, among others) indicate the systems of relevance taken into account to manage these narratives. Moreover, the use and relevance given to the term decision shows the underlying logic which enables the labelling, negotiation and reconfiguration of meaning about intentionality, decision, violence and homicide itself.
The combined analysis of the domains allows to make to two statements. Firstly, men can perform violence and commit a homicide, and not “be” violent in their own mind. Secondly, complementing the previous point, not all the presentations of the self imply that the men distanced themselves from violence. This result is particularly relevant, since it indicates that there are symbolic conditions of possibility for men to identify with lethal violence without compromising their self: “being violent” can be the result of a successful narrative management.
This thesis shows that, in order to comprehend lethal violence, it does not suffice to understand meaning separated from action, social interaction without narratives, nor biography without self-presentation. A comprehensive analysis of violence “requires” empirically-grounded elements that inquire about these domains and their articulation. The sense-making of lethal violence is ambivalent and polyphonic, as it shows that social actors employ expert knowledges and labels, as well as lay and hybrid theories to signify this event. These actions are not simply neutralisation or justification strategies: they are part of the rationalisations of their experiences and the foundation for how they relate to penal institutions. Thus, this thesis allows a review of popularised concepts, such as naturalisation of violence, honour and gender-based violence.
Keywords: homicide; violent death; violence; life story; narratives; situational dynamic; perpetrator; masculinity.
