peer-reviewed papers
Otto, Natália. 2020. ‘I Did What I Had to do’: Loyalty and Sacrifice in Girls’ Narratives of Homicide in Southern Brazil. The British Journal of Criminology.
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.
Otto, Natália, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann. 2021. Moral Entrepreneurialism for the Hamburger: Strategies for Marketing a Contested Fast Food. Cultural Sociology.
DOI: 10.1177/17499755211039932
* Nominated for the 2023 SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence.
Recent research has extended the concept of moral entrepreneurialism to corporate actors. We build on this research to investigate how corporations succeed in this effort by uncovering the strategies and tools they employ as moral entrepreneurs. To do so, we examine the corporate discourse of three prominent fast-food firms to identify how they present hamburgers as good food, in a context where beef is increasingly criticized as morally suspect. Based on a discourse analysis of corporate communications and marketing campaigns, we identify three distinct discursive strategies for managing meat criticisms: (1) global managerialism (McDonald’s); (2) aestheticized simplicity (A&W); and (3) nostalgic, personalized appeals (Wendy’s). These strategies are realized through the use of informational tools to shape what customers think and know about beef, and affective tools to influence how customers feel about beef. Together, these corporate strategies speak to the skilful ability of corporate actors to respond to socio-environmental criticisms. Our case shows how fast-food market actors are able to incorporate critique and offer messages that seek to allow people to feel good about eating beef. This case is relevant to understanding the tools that corporations use to be effective moral entrepreneurs. It also provides a deeper understanding of marketing discourse at the nexus of social problems and consumption choices.
Kruttschnitt, Candace and Natália Otto. 2020. Women’s Experiences in the Revolving Door of the Criminal Justice System: Implications for Their Imagined Futures. Women &
Criminal Justice. DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2019.1664970.
Despite the notable expansion in research on mass incarceration and reentry, we know relatively little about how women who have spent a good portion of their lives enmeshed in the criminal justice system view these experiences and how these experiences might shape their imagined future lives. We address this gap by examining the narratives of 16 black and 35 white persistent offenders imprisoned in Pennsylvania. Our findings suggest that black women report more negative criminal justice experiences than white women and that, regardless of the nature of these encounters, white women tend to have more optimist outlooks for their futures. This suggests that the racialization of structural advantages and disadvantages may compound the women’s salient criminal justice encounters. The implication of these findings for procedural justice, reentry and desistance research are discussed.
manuscripts under review & in preparation
Otto, Natália. 2025. "Girls Calculate Everything": Gender, Precarity, and Violence in Brazil's Drug Markets.
Presented at ASA 2025.
Full draft available.
Criminalized violence has increased at the urban peripheries of global capitalism since the 1990s. Scholars have shown how neoliberal policies gave rise to increasingly precarious labor markets, and how the transnational War on Drugs spurred the expansion of militarized security regimes and the growth of highly profitable illegal markets, both of which have fueled urban violence among young men. However, women have also been increasingly incarcerated and victimized in the wake of these transnational drug economies and their repression. Less is known, though, about how women and girls in South America, the bottom of the cocaine economy, have borne the brunt of these interconnected processes. This study analyzes 34 narrative interviews with criminalized girls and young women (ages 13–20) conducted in 2016, 2023, and 2024 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Participants worked in and lived amid violent and profitable drug markets. I show how drug markets provide girls with criminalized survival strategies to navigate structural gendered economic precarity and vulnerability to violence. Yet, these same strategies further expose them to state, community, and gender-based violence. I argue that this case illustrates how structural economic precarity and transnational carceral projects (re)produce gendered interpersonal violence at the urban margins.
Otto, Natália, Roberta Pamplona and Luisa Schwartzman. 2025. Violence Between the Home and the Street: Gendered Violence and The Social Construction of the Public/Private Boundary in Brazil.
Under review. Full draft available.
Studies on violence remains divided between private ‘gender-based’ violence and public ‘urban’ violence. In Brazil, these categories are called the “home” and the “street.” Latin American scholars trouble this binary, highlighting the interconnection between state, urban, and gender violence. We argue that focusing on the narrative structuring of the public/private binary can illuminate its endurance and stability across actors and institutions. We map how the “home” and the “street” shape narratives of violence by actors whose meaning-making is central to the governance and production of violence in Brazil: police officers who investigate murders (9 interviews and 36 inquiries) and girls incarcerated in a juvenile detention center (22 interviews). We find a common narrative about place, gender, and violence: the street as the space of genderless, (drug)market-related, and rational violence; and the home as the place of gendered, emotional violence. This framing reduces gender violence to emotional disputes within the family and naturalizes violence in the “street,” portraying it as unavoidable. We argue that these narratives obscure and legitimate state and interpersonal violence against women, especially those living in the highly policed favelas.
Otto, Natália. 2025. Girl, Erased: Neoliberal Penality, the War on Drugs, and Unsaying Gender in Judicial Narratives of Girls’ Crimes in Brazil.
In progress. Full draft available. To be presented at ASC 2025.
This paper contributes to the sociologies of law, punishment, and gender by examining how neoliberal penality, as a symbolic system, shapes narratives of gendered violence. I ask how gendered vulnerability is said and unsaid (Presser 2022) in narratives about teenage girls working in illegal drug markets in Brazil. Data is composed of 40 criminalized girls’ court cases set in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, between 2014-2022, complemented by 34 biographical interviews with girls incarcerated in 2016, 2023, and 2024. I found that, in cases related to drug trafficking, neoliberal penality shapes judicial narratives in particular ways. Criminalized girls are portrayed as powerful and cunning, standing on equal ground with adult men. Their crimes are framed in a wider context of drug trafficking expansion, which paints their communities as inherently violent and their actions as the result of rational choices. Girls’ personalities are mobilized to dismiss claims that they were coerced or subjected to any form of gendered vulnerability that might absolve them. While simultaneously portraying drug markets as always-already dangerous, judicial narratives invisibilize girls’ vulnerability to gendered, state, and drug-market-related violence. In these narratives, girls are agents of danger but never prey to it. I argue this silencing operates as a form of symbolic violence that invisibilizes women’s vulnerability to violence by criminal organizations and state forces and legitimates the penal harm carried out against women and girls by the transnational War on Drugs.