From invisibility to recognition: the (im)position of the peripheries in the struggles for urban citizenship

Abstract

Despite the discourses of “equal rights” and “impersonalityof the laws” that intersect the Brazilian democratic narrative, traditionally, the effective exercise of urban citizenship has been linked to strict notions of civility operated for the benefit of a fewand to the detriment of many. The peripheries are an ambiguous reflectionof this process. While presenting themselves as portraits of the injustices perpetrated against the underprivileged, distinct (complementary or excluding) forces to challenge these injustices, expressed in the resignification of the very meaning of citizenship, enforcing it through the use of violence or inscribed in the appropriation and mobilization of the political resources available to subvert the logics of inequality in operation. From assumption that the criteria for elucidating the categories mobilizedby the different actors that make up the Brazilian urban scene inform the narrative from the point of view of those who occupy it the place of speech, in this article, we articulate concepts of the sociological theory of conflicts around discourses of the “peripheral subjects” to reflect on the conditions of exercising a city citizenship in Brazil.