Liberdade de expressão e gênero: o efeito silenciador promovido pela violência de gênero e pela branquitude

Abstract

The right to freedom of expression in democratic societies ensures the public debate of ideas and enables the confrontation of opinions. It so happens that such public freedom is not unrestricted, under penalty of allowing the restriction of values linked to the dignity of the human person and pluralist democracy. This article discusses, from a democratic theory of freedom of expression, as opposed to a more libertarian theory, the

need to establish criteria for limiting freedom of expression when it jeopardizes gender equality. As points of approach, the following stand out: a) the silencing effect of hate speech; b) gender violence (and its intersectionalities) hidden in freedom of expression, including artistic violence. Bibliographic and legislative research is carried out with the objective of verifying the legal content of freedom of expression and hate speech from a democratic perspective. In this way, the silencing effect of the whiteness of hate speech and the forms of symbolic violence produced in song lyrics, advertisements and public expressions that can promote the reification of women, especially black women, turning them into an eroticized object is analyzed. It is concluded that, ultimately, it will be up to the Judiciary to regulate the debate on the limits of freedom of expression, given the impossibility, in the abstract, of establishing an unequivocal boundary between freedom and abuse.