Abstract

Brazil deals today with a process of mass incarceration that has as one of its developments a stunning increase of the female prison population. This article’s objective is to think about gender performativities in female prisons and how they are done, undone and remade. For that, we will analyze three researches that took place in Rio de Janeiro from 2009 to 2017. In order to do so, we created three fictional characters conjugating elements of real people that we interviewed and that guide a cartography of female prisons. We use Cartography as a method and aesthetic/politic positioning and as a starting point. Through notes and scraps that are frequently used by those who are incarcerated, these characters will show themselves and the forces that connect the network of power relations, affection and eroticism in the experiences of restriction and deprivation of liberty. With and through them, we will discuss how gender performativities and identity categories comprise the prison landscape, inhabited by intensities, games, disputes and negotiations, constituting lines that produce varied arrangements of gender and sexuality.

Performativities; Female Prison; Gender; Sexuality; Cartography