Mulheres trans no sistema prisional do Rio de Janeiro: a relação entre suas histórias e suas trajetórias de vida escolar

Abstract

This paper has as a goal to investigate how trans women who find themselves in custody in a space of deprivation of liberty understand their educational way. To achieve that, we used semi structured interviews with 16 inmates, discussing and presenting the relation that establishes between this educational path and the weaving of those women’s gender identity. Therefore, I stand out the specificities of being a trans woman inside the prison system, highlighting how they develop resistance tactics inside that space. Since the beginning of the research, there were leads that their educational path got them close to each other amidst their penalty loneliness, whereas in a daily basis trans people are excluded of formal educational spaces because of transfobia, religious values present in many educational institutions and the inability that many people have to deal with differences. This is a qualitative research, using as a methodology a research in/of/with the everyday life and as a technique the narrative, considering the many speeches obtained by the semi structured interviews, besides systematic observation, registering in a field notebook, adopting, for both observations and interviews, the notion of evidential paradigm of Carlo Ginzburg (1989). Through the leads, evidences and signs observed during the visitations, over conversation with the inmates and in their statements it was possible to understand how their educational experiences inside and out of the system interfered in their weaving identities, leading us to think how the suffering and the exclusion caused by transfobia in the school environment has many times irreversible reflex on trans people’s lives. As a result, this research presents through dialogs with those sixteen narratives, the perception of the inmates’ realization of the importance of education, having their paths crossed countless times by violence, hate and intolerance. Most part of inmates that revealed not finishing their studies before going to jail mentioned transfobia as one of the reasons of why they abandoned school which reaffirms the importance of targeted policies for trans students. The inmates that could not finish their studies for different reasons revealed social questions the corroborated to their educational rupture situation. Anyways, those stories reveal conjectures in which those women saw themselves helpless by their families, school, the State, or everyone at the same time. Therefore it is necessary to move forward in the matter of social vulnerabilities faced by trans people before, during and after incarceration since this segment is going back to the streets with egress and trans stigma - and, accordingly to the data of this research race, social class and low education.