The Gender of Inmate Governance in Northeast Brazil

Literature on Brazilian prisons has focused on the imperfect and sometimes very partial extent to which state agents effectively dominate their governance, emphasizing the importance of arrangements in which people who are incarcerated play a central role in governing prisons. Yet, research on inmate governance arrangements has overwhelmingly focused on prisons for men and the experiences of men. Moreover, it rarely considers how governance arrangements are gendered. I address these gaps by using a gender lens to analyze results from an ethnographic study of a men’s prison and a women’s prison that are located within the same compound in Northeast Brazil. This analysis shows that governance arrangements vary between prisons situated within the same compound and that these arrangements reflect, reinforce, and produce ideas about masculinity and femininity. Whereas the men’s prison conforms to scholarly and popular expectations about the inmate governance of Brazilian prisons, the women’s prison defies these expectations insofar as state agents effectively dominate its governance. I argue that the conspicuous absence of a governing collectivity of incarcerated women at the women’s prison—which is deeply connected to the uneven distribution of rights, prerogatives, and power enjoyed by men and women both inside and beyond the penal compound—undermines the ability of incarcerated women and their visitors to mitigate pains of imprisonment as well as pains of visitation. Moreover, the “present absence” of a governing collectivity of incarcerated women, and its implications, reinforces a controlling image of economically dispossessed and racialized women as incapable of governing themselves and others.