Material politics: utility documents, claims-making and construction of the ‘deserving citizen’ in Rio de Janeiro

Through an ethnographic study of a document in urban Brazil—the electricity bill—
this article argues for developing a relational and materialist approach to citizenship.
It analyzes the uses and meaning of this document for favela residents, the state, and
the private electricity provider, within projects to regularize illegal connections and the
so-called “pacification” program, a state security policy to re-establish state territorial
control. It investigates the tensions between the market-oriented processes of electricity
regularization and citizenship by examining the implications of this contractual change
on the way state and non-state actors and residents frame rights and responsibilities
linked to membership in society. Analysis of this document reveals how citizenship
framing takes specific shape in line with both state reforms and urban processes of
differentiation. It shows that the bill both materializes normative ideas of “deserving
citizenship” as a territorial, moral, and material process, and realizes the potential for
political contestation. The article thus expands on analysis of documents as material
mediators of social and political relations and proposes an understanding of citizenship as a negotiated process involving people, state, and non-state actors and objects.
[Documents; Citizenship; Materiality; Favelas; Politics; Electricity]