Looking for the “Redemption of Cam”

raciality and intersectionality in a women’s prison

Abstract

This article discusses the overlap between racial constructs in Brazil and their configuration in intramural environments, recognizing the prison as a relatively impermeable locus in the process of Black identity construction in Brazil during recent decades. The paper discusses the formative elements of modern racism, taking into account specificities of the Brazilian context in the face of foundational experiences of African kidnapping and enslavement in the colonial period and their legacies, the concepts of whitening, racial contract and raciality device, as intelligibility categories of contemporary racism and its reinventions in societies that have experienced modern slavery. These categories are analyzed based on the reports on interracial relations elaborated by a cisgender woman and a transgender man, inmates in a female penitentiary in São Paulo, and show how the oppression experienced in an intersectional way, by racialized prisoners, imposes additional difficulties on them in their process of recognizing a Black identity.