O educar-se em beleza com mulheres em privação de liberdade em uma prisão APAC de Minas Gerais - Brasil

Abstract

This research had as its general objective to understand how women deprived of liberty, housed in an institution of the Association for the Protection and Assistance to Convicted Persons (APAC), experience and give meaning to educational processes within the social practice of “learning beauty”. Specifically, it sought to: analyze the relationships between education and beauty for women in situations of incarceration; identify educational processes within the social practice of learning beauty promoted in the APAC environment; and examine how women interpret cultural norms of beauty within a context of deprivation of liberty. The study was grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, articulating concepts of beauty as a social construction and as a device of control; the notion of woman from an intersectional perspective; and education as a practice of resistance and subjectivation. These references enabled an understanding of learning beauty as a social practice traversed by power relations and processes of identity (re)signification. Methodologically, the research adopted ethnomethodology, using participant observation, field diaries, and conversation circles as the main data production procedures. Fieldwork was conducted in a female prison unit within the APAC system, guided by sensitive listening and the shared construction of meanings, in dialogue with participants’ ways of life, narratives, and silences. The analyses revealed that beauty is experienced simultaneously as a mechanism for regulating female bodies and as a space of care, belonging, hope, and identity reconstruction. Practices such as applying makeup, caring for hair, sharing products, organizing spaces, and supporting other women constitute educational social practices through which knowledge, values, strategies for coexistence, and ways of existing in contexts of deprivation of liberty are produced. The findings also showed that the prison environment and the APAC methodology itself establish an ambivalent relationship with beauty, at times linking it to human dignity and appreciation, and at times mobilizing it as an instrument of discipline and control. In contrast, the women develop creative ways of (re)signifying institutional and cultural norms, transforming self-care and care for others into practices of resistance, memory, affection, and projection of possible futures. It is concluded that learning beauty constitutes a social practice that generates educational processes contributing to the affirmation of dignity, identity, and humanity among women deprived of liberty. By highlighting the knowledge produced by historically silenced women, this research broadens the understanding of education and reaffirms the potential of everyday educational practices as forms of resistance, care, and the production of new ways of existing.