O VÍCIO EM HUMILHAR: PRISÃO, ESTADO E GÊNERO EM NARRATIVAS SOBRE A REVISTA ÍNTIMA/VEXATÓRIA

Abstract

The article discusses the intimate/vexatious body search based on the narrative disputes surrounding its existence, its prohibition, and subsequent replacement by body scanners in São Paulo state prisons. I argue that the body search constitutes a field of dispute that has women's bodies as territory and that involves prisoners, family members, non-governmental organizations, governmental organizations, and the Justice System. Amid these disputes, people and groups produce ideas of violation, humiliation, human degradation, and abuse perpetrated by the State on the bodies submitted to the body search. Such bodies require to be understood as victims in narrative efforts to produce intelligible cases in the field of Law. The article follows the different frameworks that constitute the body search as a subject of debate and dispute, with confluences and tensions between subjects that, located in different fields, constitute different meanings and practices in relation to the body search. Discussions around the intimate/vexatious body search are key to understanding the transits of people between inside and outside prison, describing the production of prison borders, and glimpsing some ways in which prison, State, and gender are connected in the formation of violable bodies and of violation mechanisms in prison.