Masculinidades no cárcere ou o cárcere das masculinidades

Abstract

The “world of crime” is a world majorly habited by men, from agents of the justice system, criminalized individuals and presenters of police programs to those who research them. Nevertheless, seldomly this “common denominator” is taken into account, since the male gender is, in a phallocentric culture, of the invisible order, the neutral, the obvious. Thus, this research seeks to shed light on this “common denominator”, widely naturalized in the criminological field, especially in prison studies. Therefore, what is put on debate here is the fabrication not only of crime, criminal or social control, classic objects of study in criminology, but masculinity itself which conforms the prison environment. In order to understand this relationship between masculinity and Latin American punitive power, I seek to evaluate gender performances executed by “men of the prison”, specially, but not only, prison officers. That is, from a feminist post-structuralist position, I think these men as gendered subjects, using secondary local ethnographic sources, combined with a conceptual-analytical support of sociological, philosophical-political and critical psychoanalytical theories. The course of the research suggests, among other things, that prison men manipulate gender as a position and not as nature, which points to the hypothesis that prison dynamics are configured not only by formal hierarchies such as agent/detainee, but also by violent masculinity performances vying for power among themselves. Furthermore, although agents and detainees see themselves as opposing groups, they have more similarities than differences, especially with regard to the type of socialized and performed masculinity.