Penal system's underground dimension: a feminist, intersectional, and decolonial gaze upon the jailing of black women in 21st century Brazil.

Abstract

The doorways of prisons do not and will not be the sole ones to define the process of penal custody of black women within and outside these same prisons. As in all aspects of social, political, and economic lives, the experience of prison cannot be thought from a general and subliminal perspective, one that could be found in people generally defined as “woman” but whose race, social condition, and sexuality would have little or nothing to do with their life experiences up to that moment or beginning at that moment, within or outside the surveilled walls.  From an epistemological standpoint that is a feminist, intersectional, and decolonial, this article reflects upon what Brazil's system of penal justice has been in the past decades, in continuity with what Brazil has always been for black women over the centuries.