Não se nasce mulher criminosa, torna-se: Bahia (1850-1888)

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates, through an extensive analysis of various archival collections and documentary typologies, with an emphasis on police and prison records, how the Brazilian State, within the context of the disintegration of the slave system, criminalized practices and behaviors based on criteria of gender, race, class, and nationality. It analyzes the transformation of women into criminals through the categorization of identities and behaviors, placing them under a permanent state of suspicion; that is, the potential harm they were perceived to represent to the functioning of an ordered society. This study argues that the woman under suspicion was produced through exclusion, as a result of an insidious policy of criminalization and incarceration for purportedly corrective purposes, functioning as the counterpart to the omission of skin color in the Constitutional Charter as a requirement for the formal exercise of citizenship. Throughout the period studied, suspicion incorporated other criteria beyond color as a basis for criminalization, in a context in which the population of color was becoming predominantly free, thus consolidating itself as an instrument for the administration of liberty, defining its conditions through the necessity of correction. In this process, figures such as the disorderly, the disobedient, the fugitive, the drunkard, the offender of public morality, and the alienated became fundamental categories of repression and central characters in the history of Bahia in the second half of the 19th century. The female body, historically viewed with suspicion, became even more visible, transforming into a privileged object of political, medical, and legal discourses that reiterated the need to control it as a social and moral imperative.