Desejo e separação monas, gays e envolvidos num presídio em São Paulo

Abstract

This ethnography was conducted as a result of conversations with travesties, bichas (transgender people), gays and envolvidos (prison men that bond with transgender subjects) confined in a São Paulo's penitentiary. Through these encounters, I managed to product an image of the possible movements and paths from the pink gallery, term that combines travesties, bichas, gays and envolvidos at physical space, furthermore as a set of bodies, of people. Therefore, this composition gains credence in the beholding of romantic, sexual and economic dynamics that compounds the existential territory of my interlocutors. I hope to have successfully showed how separation movements always were followed by possible encounters on the three chapters that assemble this dissertation. In this sense, there are ladrões (thieves) that morally separates themselves from monas (term used to designate bichas and travesties as feminine subjects) yet only to find them again in prostitution. The ladrão ought to control the limits between his desire and the abject that insidiously is felt in the body of a mona, diverting from the risk of becoming an envolvido. Monas that are the expression of a border, overcoming barriers and contexts as an affirmation of femininity and its idiosyncrasies. Ladrões metamorphosed into envolvidos and which loses their moral ground. Envolvidos, in its turn, that marries monas. Monas that abandon their lives in celas cabaré (prostitution cells) to marry envolvidos. Monas that secretly dates ladrões. Couples that live together but suspiciously feel envious, gossip and fight. Couples that produce intense associative dynamics, involved in economic transactions that generate family. Couples separated by prison, by their different sentences and by surprise transference among penitentiaries. Love and interest, disputes unfolding in the shadow of an architecture created in articulation with prisoner’s subjectivity. Enhanced, this ethnography takes root in analytically describing the encounter of the narratives of monas and envolvidos, combining with the anthropological matters that got me into that prison. It is an ethnography of the prison as well, a membrane that cuts through the existence of prisoners, as porous and permeable, uniting and separating, inextricably comprised of associative romantic and sexual arranges that make possible the existence of the intense, but partial image that this dissertation proposes.