Vidas costuradas por fios de ferro: trajetórias das mães do Ceará

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to understand black maternity through the trajectories of mothers who have had their children brutally murdered in the city of Fortaleza. To this end, we conducted qualitative research, with interviews, field research and field diaries. We sought to delve deeper into the issues surrounding black motherhood, especially its implications for the manifestations of multiple forms of violence that are reproduced on a daily basis. Based on the conceptions of social and sexual reproduction, we articulated the concepts of biopolitics and biopower, working with an intersectional approach, intertwining them with the experiences and stories narrated by the interlocutors. We problematize the concept of the biopolitics of motherhood, in which we bring up the meanings of “unconventional mothers”, addressing the normalization of what it is to be a “black mother”, through various devices and technologies of power. We point out that black mothers seem to be doubly implicated in biopolitics, as they produce ways of making people live and try not to let them die, thus putting pressure on other meanings and understandings of black lives. With this, we analyzed the importance of weaving concepts that make it possible to understand these maternities through a decentralized theoretical and methodological field, since black motherhood seems to be a political sign marked by Brazil's colonial history, which places violence on the reproductive bodies of black women, denying them the right to be mothers, while they historically stress and produce other collective and ancestral forms of mothering.