Uma cartografia das amas-de-leite na sociedade carioca oitocentista

Abstract

What did it mean to be “ama-de-leite” in Rio de Janeiro’s nineteenth century society? The question guides the research made through discourses of medicine, press, public administration, literature and iconography. “Amas-de-leite” were recognized in their African or descendant black or dark skin female bodies that used to be bought, sold or rent to nourish owner’s families sons and daughters. Their images/representations reveal a politics, considering institutional codes and the positiveness of knowledge, where identities emerge also to control and put in order an enslaver and patriarchal society. Bodies reveal sex-gender, race, age and civil condition features, and the effort to classify, to point physical differences out, to materialize an alphabet and an architecture of relations and social inequalities.