Ethnography and Gender: Reflections from within Some Brazilian Prisons

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways in which gender as a technology of power (articulated with other categories of differentiation) operates in three dimensions in relation to prisons and in ethnographic doing in prisons. First, in the ways in which gender technologies constitute the penitentiary institution, evident in the strongly gendered masculine character of state punishment. Second, in the ways in which gender devices traverse and produce the ethnographic field. Finally, gender operates in prisons as agency and resistance devices among the inmate population.

Prison Ethnography; Brazilian Prisons; Gender Devices