Drawing the Gears of Justice:

Access to Justice in a Women's Protection Police Station

Abstract

This article focuses on analyzing the mechanisms articulated through the practices and discourses used by institutions within the justice system and their actors in the application of social rights and public policies. We situate the debate within a gender perspective, problematizing the representations and demands of women who come into contact with this control system, with a focus on the activities undertaken at a Women's Defense Police Station (DDM). We use the waiting room as a spatial cut to consider the DDM as an engineered juridical-penal device, operating its machinery to delimit spaces, forms of language, and actions for the individuals who engage with it, constructing subjectivities, shifting discourses, and repositioning identities. The empirical-inductive methodology of qualitative approach was employed, based on field research at a Women's Defense Police Station, using ethnographic observation with field notes, aligned with Deleuzian cartography, including the use of images and illustrations. Finally, we start from the premise that the possibility of these discursive shifts reflects that law is not a closed apparatus in itself, but one open to repositioning and identity reconstruction, creating subjectivities and subject positions, delimiting spaces, forms of language, and responses for those who engage with the legal system.