Envelhecimento no cárcere: mulheres, interseccionalidades e a escrevivência de um psicólogo negro em contexto prisional

Abstract

In this thesis, we invite incarcerated women to speak about time, traces, aging, and old age itself. We propose that they retrieve from their memories stories shaped by the temporality of prison, a temporality that, although deeply inscribed in their lives, also produces subjective folds of “in spite of.” The study investigates how the aging of incarcerated women is produced and traversed by intersectional markers, demonstrating that gender, race, class, and other structural forces shape different ways of experiencing time, the body, and old age in prison. The study also shows how the psychologist’s practice in the prison context is equally permeated by these markers and, therefore, cannot be understood outside a broader political, ethical, and social horizon. This is a qualitative, exploratory study with a biographical approach that articulates autobiography and life history. Two methodological strategies were adopted. In Study 1, narrative interviews were conducted with 11 incarcerated women, who narrated their experiences of aging in prison. The interviews were transcribed, organized, and analyzed based on the recurrence of shared themes and meanings, which enabled the construction of analytical categories and comparative examination of the narratives. In Study 2, first-person narratives were produced, grounded in escrevivência, through which subjective, political, and ethical affects arising from work within the prison system were elaborated. The analyses were interpreted in light of intersectionality, biopower, necropolitics, and psychological frameworks. The results of Study 1 demonstrated that, even before reaching the age legally recognized as old age, participants already experience intense effects of time and imprisonment on their lives. Study 2, in turn, shows that becoming a psychologist within prison units, from the perspective of a Black man and his intersecting identities, positions him as a target within the prison system: a body in constant dialogue with the contradictions of this space, between providing care and being subjected to structural racism and other forms of violence. Narrating the interweaving of my trajectory with theirs, connected through ethnic-racial markers and shared historical violences, is to understand that this writing is also a form of insurgency. This thesis concludes that these women are imprisoned not only physically, but also by symbolic structures that perpetuate inequalities and intensify violence. These are layers that do not close in on themselves, but echo one another, forming a territory of reflection. Thus, the thesis advocates for the formulation and implementation of public policies that guarantee rights to women who age in conditions of deprivation of liberty, for the visibility of their narratives, and for the recognition of the inevitably political nature of psychological care in prison contexts.