“Corpos Encaliçados De Prisão”: Mulheres e Subjetividades em Exceção

Abstract

In recent decades, the crisis in the prison system has demonstrated its inefficiency and cruelest reality, indicating prison as a place of exclusion and death. Existing situations of precariousness, insecurity and violence are recurrent, resulting from the great incarceration and overcrowding. In the composition of the Brazilian prison system, there are several practices that intersect the disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical powers, practices that make up the prison in a territory of suspension of rights, a permanent State of Exception. Among these bodies placed the exception in prison, women are the main targets of the incessant incidence of the powers that embody their bodies and their subjectivities. Taking the prison as a diagram of forces, this work is a qualitative research and it is a Foucaultian analysis of powers. Thus, it had as its general objective: to analyze the power relationships that affect female bodies in prison. The research site was the Mixed Penitentiary of Parnaíba - PI, and the use of field diaries and collective interviews was used. The diagram of powers in prison consists of disciplinary lines for women, with the scanning of their spaces, the control of activities, the punishment of transgressive behaviors and permanent surveillance; by lines of biopolitical control of bodies, such as limiting their sexuality and inefficiency of specific services for women's health; and by lines that operate by the necropolitical logic, such as the precarious food provided, idleness, in addition to the abandonment or forgetfulness to which many are subjected in prison. It was found that the penal system operates through sexist, classist and racist practices, prolonging the social structure, excluding and discriminating, granting women prisoners a double penalty. But there is also resistance, such as the organization and solidarity of the group, the transgression of norms and the building of friendships, in addition to feminist expressions proper to the ways of life of incarcerated women, which indicates the need for intersectional studies and considering their particularities and militancy forms. Finally, the encounter with women prisoners also challenges the body of a woman-psychologist-researcher, produces desubjectivations and new territories, tensioning her representations about her condition as a white, academic woman, her feminist ideals and also her condition of freedom