The Politics of Representation of Crime and Criminal Investigation

A very appropriate film to use when conducting an analysis of the politics of representation of crime and criminalization is 'The City of God'. This is a very powerful film that deals with troubled youth in the heart of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. This film is based on a true story but it is the story that is being 're-presented' to us that we should be most interested in. It is also very important that while doing an analysis like this, a great deal of attention is paid to the intersecting variables, which are evident throughout the film. By doing this, an intersectional analysis will help us to account for the way characters in this film, most notably the poor young Black male, are constructed to produce a particular kind of representation. Besides the politics of representation, however, another important theme, which arises constantly from this film, is the idea of strain theory, and a few examples of this will be demonstrated throughout.…