Coloniality of Punitive Power in the Governance of Gender and Race: Governmental Framings of Women Relatives of Incarcerated Individuals
Visiting; prision; gender; race; State
The research aims to place at the center the intersection of race–gender–class in the necrobiopolitical governance carried out by state criminal agencies. Thus, it analyzes state practices that are constituted by and traversed through racial, gender, and class dynamics. State procedures were examined by taking prison as an event (DAS, 2020) that reverberates in the daily lives of women family members, connecting the inside and outside of the prison, as well as its flows (GODOI, year). Understanding prison in an expanded way, I sought to follow the movements of women who visit their imprisoned relatives. In this process, I realized that the notion of relatives, women, and visitors is not given a priori, but is constructed in relation to the state itself (VIANNA and LOWENKRON, 2017), producing moralities, gendering, and racialization, as well as state understandings and practices regarding who can be framed within such a qualification. I therefore begin from the understanding that the relationship between the punitive apparatus and women visitors materializes the governance of a specific population contingent, which persists beyond prison walls, encompassing not only incarcerated individuals, but also taking shape in the flow of this relationship—both inside and outside—and in its porosity. I thus seek to pursue this question by moving through different spaces and observing the actors and institutions involved in this state (co)production.