Fragmentación, performatividad y ritualidad en torno a la definición judicial de la violencia de género contra mujeres madres.

Abstract

This article analyzes how family courts in Chile construct judicial definitions of gender violence. Drawing on interviews with judges, technical advisors, and curadores ad litem, it examines how bureaucratic practices and judicial rituals translate the experiences of women, girls, and boys into legal categories that fragment and hierarchize harm. From an anthropological and feminist perspective, the study articulates insights from the anthropology of the state and bureaucracy with debates on performativity and institutional violence. It argues that hearings, technical reports, and court rulings constitute scenes where judicial authority is performed through gestures, documents, and affects, reproducing a pedagogy of inequality. Family justice thus emerges as a field where regimes of truth about violence are constantly disputed, and where legal neutrality conceals
enduring gender hierarchies.