Our aim is to discuss the processes of objectification, disqualification and criminalization of a traditional fishing community, located by the sea on the urban area of Maceió, that is fighting against the municipal government for the right to remain in this territory and for local public investments. Based on Michel Foucault's studies, we propose a problematization of these forms of objectification, subjectification and government, analyzing practices and knowledge that focus on this community. We use records produced in four years of work at this place, as well as documents and media materials that address the conflict. We discuss the judicialization of life, from two aspects: a) discourses that operate as conditions of possibility to sustain the proposal for removing this community of its territory; b) strategies of résistance that affirm the specificity of life in this place. We highlight this situation to the debate on the judicialization of life seeking not only to discuss the circumstances in which we come to require more legal intervention in the governance of life, but also to claim that what is at stake in this situation, is not merely the applying and the compliance with the law, but the ways of life of this community that confront the logic of investment and urban development of the city.
Social justice; social discrimination; social problems