Tyrannies of intimacy: impasses around the intimate search of imprisoned trans women

Abstract

This article explores the impasses that have arisen with the process of drafting and applying new normative regulations to serve the LGBT population within the penitentiary and socio-educational system of Minas Gerais. These resolutions established, among other recommendations, that intimate searches on transgender women should be carried out exclusively by female security officers. In view of this new rule, I analyze the controversies raised by the female agents, who refused to carry out the security procedures and called a public hearing to address the issue, alleging “gender violence” against the professional category. Thus, based on ethnographic incursions into an LGBT wing of a male prison unit and into the public audience in question, I discuss the complex and heterogeneous nature of the modes of moral regulation of gender expressions and the gender- and sexuality-related practices involved in the quarrels around the everyday management of trans women in prisons and in the socio-education system.