Entre muros e amores: trajetórias de visitas e afetos nas prisões cearenses

Abstract

The central theme of this study is the social experience of women who are involved in romantic and marital relationships with incarcerated men in Ceará. The objective is to understand how they experience conjugality and how they interpret their experiences of life and survival within the walls of Ceará's prisons. I seek the narratives of these women, who are often pejoratively classified as “criminals' wives,” to understand their representations of conjugality, family, and incarceration, tracing the paths they establish from their prison experience with other women, drawing attention to how affective conjugal relationships reproduce family ties, mobilize actions, conflicts, and diverse situations for their lives. I privilege the perspective of prisons as productive spaces for relationships, in which it is possible to identify how conjugalities are signified and reinvented based on the agreements and strategies arranged by women. To this end, I accompany their “walks,” mainly social visits to the prisons where their partners are incarcerated.