Women, temporalities and rhythms in brazilian and frenh prisons

Abstract

This is a review of the book by Luana Martins Fazer a pena andar: an ethnography on serving time and its rhythms in women’s prisons in Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Marseille, published in 2024, which analyzes the experience of female incarceration in two comparative contexts between Brazil, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and France, in the cities of Marseille and Paris. The author proposes the concept of rhythms in order to identify the ways in which “the sentence is carried out” through insertion into new spatial contexts and temporalities and seeks to reflect on the experience of women’s incarceration and to understand the meanings given to it in both contexts. Among other issues, it highlights how imprisonment has different nuances and crosses personal experiences, causing “mismatches”, ruptures and requiring new strategies to rebuild life within a locked space. From this perspective, it presents us with stories of unique women, with fears, anxieties, guilt, frustrations, feelings of discomfort and joy, which also reveal relevant social issues and must be interpreted contextually. In dealing with both contexts, even identifying “better” material conditions in France and ‘worse’ ones in Brazil, the author shows how the experience of imprisonment is always traumatizing and requires emotional effort to be “digested”. After all, it has different rhythms and, depending on the conditions experienced, some can be more or less tortuous and violent.