Em nome da mãe: análise de repertórios linguísticos sobre a maternidade no sistema prisional

Abstract

The present study understand the meanings produced in the academic literature of psychology on maternity in prisons, with the concept of gender as the guiding principle of this discussion. The perspective we adopt is based on assumptions of the constructionist movement and social psychology, when we consider that language is a social action and that we use repertoires to produce meanings about the world. These repertoires are words or sets of words that share a significant link between them, which delimits the conditions and possibilities of action in a particular field of human activity. Highlighting the repertoires allows us to identify the multiple versions on motherhood in the prison system and understand the resulting controversies. To construct the object of study, we selected national scientific publications related to the subject of female incarceration that were available in the national databases Scientific Electronic Library Online (SCIELO); Periodicals of the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); and Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde (BVS), using the following descriptors: women in prison and incarcerated women. This procedure enabled the construction of a scenario about where, when and what areas of knowledge have been producing researches on this topic. Taking us to the second moment of this research, to focus on the scientific productions of psychology. The analysis of the repertoires present in the summaries of the 14 articles related to psychology results in the following thematic axes: pregnancy and motherhood (3), everyday life in prison and its contradictions (5), mental health and religion (1), violence and criminality (1), drugs and mental disorders (1), homosexuality in prison space (1), imprisonment and social visibility (1), education in the prison system (1). Those articles that address the issue of pregnancy and motherhood in the prison context were selected for analysis of the full text. The analytical resource used was Dialogic Maps. These discursive productions describe motherhood from the following thematic axes: (a) motherhood, (b) prison/jail, (c) child development, (d) breastfeeding, (e) rights, (f) stereotypes, (g) resocialization. The experience of motherhood in Brazilian prisons has been growing in the face of the selective incarceration of women in the prison system, little assistance is still directed at them at this stage, being the baby or biological and reproductive issues the central focus of public health policies, criminal justice and most of the academic productions. The results show that the productions of psychology, while expanding the discussions about motherhood in the prison system, sustain oppressive discourses and practices about the parenting of these women.