“[...] kill a bunch of poor Black kids” in a comment on 55chan from EndChan under the approach of Metalinguistics and Cultural Criminology

Abstract

55chan is a Brazilian subforum hosted on the EndChan forum that has operated outside of state regulation and in disagreement with constitutional frameworks that support the democratic order, such as citizenship (art. 1, item II, CF/88), human dignity (art. 1, item III, CF/88) and political pluralism (art. 1, item V, CF/88). In this digital field, a criminal subculture has been established, in which statements perform violent social evaluations through a racially genocidal and openly antidemocratic style of language. These statements operate under the sign of the inferiorization of the other, in order to produce a counter-constitution that claims for itself a freedom of expression averse to any ethical or legal responsibility, which establishes a normativity parallel to that of the Democratic State of Law. In this context, the objective is to analyze a statement published in the 55chan subforum as an expression of the language of its criminal subculture, with the intention of identifying, through Metalinguistics and Cultural Criminology, the discursive style mobilized therein. The research is justified in two fields: i) legal, by the need to analyze speeches that publicly incite the commission of crimes (art. 286, Penal Code); ii) academic, by the need to contribute to the literature on 55chan as a subforum for the circulation of racist and antidemocratic speeches. The theoretical framework is interdisciplinary and is supported by the Metalinguistics of Bakhtin (2015, 2016, 2018, 2022), Medvedev (2016) and Voloshinov (2018, 2019) in dialogue with the Cultural Criminology of Ferrell, Hayward and Young (2019), Khaled Jr., and Dimou (2022), Khaled Jr., Linck and Carvalho (2022), Rocha (2013), and Rocha and Silva (2014). The methodology is planned by selecting a comment published in 2024 in the indicated subforum with the following criteria: i) historical relevance; ii) public incitement to commit a criminal act; iii) analytical-interpretative potential. The results allow us to understand that, when constituting his discursive style, the speaker mobilizes affects (hatred, repulsion, desire for destruction), shared meanings (teachers and children as threats) and subcultural performance (the incitement to the physical and symbolic annihilation of the other), in order to legitimize and normalize a school massacre.