Abstract
This article discusses the process of institutional removal of young people that reside in foster care institutions for reaching adulthood. It relies on a politics of the sensitive to make visible the encounters and mismatches that take place between young people and Brazilian public policies. To do so, meetings were held with young people who had already experienced the removal process and with young people who would soon turn 18 and would have to leave the host institutions. To make these existences visible, this study invested in the writing of biographems, inspired by the works of Roland Barthes. The concepts of necropolitics and precarious lives were fundamental to understand the omissions of the State at the time of removal. It was also found that the State can maximize the precariousness of some lives, especially those marked by culturally marginalized race, gender, and class characteristics. However, it is also the encounter with public policies that ensures better living conditions for some, facilitating access to the university and the labor market. This research points out that, in the face of abandonment, young people become fireflies, producing luminosity amid the darkness and claiming the right to life.
Keywords:
Institutional Removal; Youth; Biographems; Public Policies