The Passage: “Social locations” and the field of prisons*

With an ethnographic description of my processes of entering three female prisons in São Paulo – as a researcher, volunteer and family visitor – I analyze how ethnographic research methods were intimately related to the territorialities and procedures of the examination of the subjects that crossed the checkpoints, the border posts of the penitentiary institutions. Based on a feminist and anthropological literature, I argue that to speak of the ethnographic passage through the corridors of the penitentiaries necessarily involves speaking of technologies of gender. They produce and create hierarchies of subjects with different locations in the geographies of power that edify prisons.

Prison; Anthropology; Feminisms; Gender; Social Localizations