"Requirements to children’s care at family law during the COVID-19 pandemics in Brazil".
Nuclear family. Gender. Parental authority. Custody of children. Maternal mortality.
The COVID-19 pandemics highlighted the centrality of care to make life possible. Regarding children care, there is a mismatch between the law about parental authority - which sets the nuclear family in the center of the children's care responsibility -, and the effective care exercise, pronouncedly gendered and matrilineal. The Brazilian law calls nuclear family the one formed by one parental pair or by a mother or a father with children. This research was carried out from a corpus formed by interviews and two court proceedings related to custody of children, filed after the death of the woman-mother Adriana. Adriana was killed: the healthcare aimed the pregnancy, not her, and there was bad management of health politics during the COVID-19 pandemics in Brazil. The work aimed at understanding the interconnections of patriarchy, nuclear family and judiciary branch from the analysis of a claiming for the custody of three children from different paternal lineages. For the analysis of the court proceedings, I understand archive as a methodological category that enables different perspectives on the truth production about people. The judiciary archive and the law are not produced by neutral form to women and children. The mismatch between the family law and the effective children’s care 1 exercise is indicated by the emic categories of the interlocutor: house of the five women, sudden love, grandma role. The archive brings differences on the acknowledgement of the responsibility bonds related to children, and evidences on how the allocation of possession over children is operated and the dispossession of children’s care bonds happens. I concluded that the judiciary branch operated in the claimings for the custody of these three children in a way that reaffirmed a family model that allows men-fathers the administration over women and children. The judiciary power made a move to validate the absent paternal power and the sudden love, undoing the house of five women.