"CARCERAL CITIZENSHIP" AND COLLECTIVE ACTION OF PRISON SURVIVORS: POLITICAL MOBILIZATION AND MEANING-MAKING AFTER INCARCERATION IN SÃO PAULO

Abstract

This article examines how women who are survivors of incarceration in São Paulo transform individual experiences of imprisonment into collective practices of resistance and the production of political meaning. Drawing on the concept of carceral citizenship (Miller & Stuart, 2017), originally formulated in the U.S. context, the article proposes a situated analytical shift, exploring its limits and potential for understanding Brazilian dynamics of punishment, exclusion, and political mobilization, which are shaped by profound racial, gender, and class inequalities. The research adopts a qualitative, multi-method approach, combining ethnography, participant observation, and analysis of public biographical narratives of five activists: Tempestade, Camila Felizardo, Helen Baum, Mary Jello, and Iyá Batia de Oxum. Their trajectories, articulated through collectives of carceral survivors such as Por Nós, the Carandiru Memory Collective, and the First Front of Carceral Survivors, reveal narrative disputes, claims for recognition, and interventions in public policy. The article argues that, in São Paulo, carceral citizenship takes on paradoxical contours: while it reproduces exclusions, it also opens space for the emergence of insurgent practices through which survivors of incarceration produce situated knowledges, contest dominant narratives, and intervene in penal and public policies, thereby stretching the limits of citizenship in contemporary Brazil.