Matrevivências sob sentença

etnografando a governança e a injustiça reprodutiva sobre mulheres-mães com filhas(os) em acolhimento institucional

Abstract

In this article, we analyze how the Brazilian state, through its social protection public policies and justice system, crosses, regulates, and disauthorizes the motherhoods of women-mothers with children in institutional care. The research, conducted in Mossoró/RN, was based on an engaged, situated, and ethically committed ethnography, combining in-depth interviews with women-mothers, analysis of institutional documents, and field diary records produced throughout the monitoring of these women's trajectories within the social protection network. The interlocutors, mostly Black and mixed-race women, have their experiences shaped by structural inequalities, gender-based violence, and historical processes of social neglect. From these narratives, we forged the analytical category matrevivências to name the precarious, strained, and surveilled ways of living motherhood under constant state intervention. Anchored in feminist, decolonial, and intersectional frameworks, articulated with Foucauldian studies on biopolitics and governance and dialoguing with other critical perspectives, we highlight that such institutional practices are not neutral: they configure devices of reproductive governance that racialize care, moralize poverty, and reinforce individual blame. By mobilizing concepts such as reproductive injustice and necrobiopower, we denounce how the social suffering of these women is systematically translated into technical diagnoses, erasing the intersections of class, race, and gender that structure their experiences. We conclude by reaffirming that these processes express a state governance that deepens reproductive injustice.