Flowers and birds

Discipline, agency and resistance practices in total institutions

Abstract

This article is the result of an analytical exercise that brings together two investigations in total institutions in the city of Imperatriz-MA (Brazil): the Renascer Feminino Therapeutic Community (TC) and the foster care center Casa da Criança. The interest in the dialog between these researches stems from the realization that the researchers – involved in separate studies – interacted with subjects who had relationships with each other: some of the women living in the Renascer Feminino TC are mothers of some children living in the foster care center Casa da Criança, who remain in the custody of the State, waiting for their mothers to return or to placed definitely for adoption. Thus, these two ethnographies have revealed the common aspects that determine the functioning of the two institutions and the relationship stablished between the children and the women, and between both groups and the leaders. The main theme of this article is the discussion of the control and discipline exerted over the children and women by the State, whose rhetoric leans on the possible reunification of both agents, if they submit to the control of the State. Otherwise, these agents – children and women – create strategies to escape disciplinary control, resisting the total institutional control and developing new ways of belonging to the institutions in which they currently live.