Based on the Materialist Discourse Analysis, the present study aims to analyze written textual productions produced by women in situations of deprivation of liberty in Brazilian prisons in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and published in the year of 2022. In three texts analyzed, we observe a regularity: the absence of naming the prison as the space where they live. To name it, they resort to the deictic here and to other linguistic constructions that erase the referent, rescued by the work of the discursive memory in relation to the conditions of discourse production. The absence of the name, considered as “empty place”, allows the development of the analysis around the concept of traumatic event (CARRENHO, 2021), related to the places of enunciation and subjectivation processes (ZOPPI-FONTANA, 2003). The analysis points to the way in which confinement produces, in the body and in the language, the traumatic event, an effect of the repression of the Brazilian penal state, through which we can understand that the testimonial functioning works in every taking of the word in the ordinary of the sense.
