Free Parda Living from Prostitucion

Gender, Race and Sexuality in the 19th Century Goiás

Abstract

It is proposed with this study to investigate how discursive and non-discursive practices, legitimized by relations of knowledge and power, historically produced black female bodies in Goiás in the 19th century. For this, judicial and police proceedings are challenged, particularly criminal complaints, which allow discussing the construction machinery of Black women, indicating how the axes of power: gender, race and/or social condition go through this process. The argument that we defend is that the process of construction of black women, in different discursive materialities, suggests the onslaughts of moral control over a poorer social parcel, effective, with greater apparatus, from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The idea was to control, subalternize, discriminate, discipline and punish behaviors and values incompatible with moral, sexual and even loving norms. The purpose of such vigilance was to build a disciplinary and economic society, with a strong focus on black and poor women, with the aim of making them docile, useful and orderly.