Between pigs and men: ethnography of “tranca” in a forensic psychiatric hospital

Abstract

In this article, I intend to explore ethnographically how care and power are articulated in the compulsory treatment in a forensic psychiatric hospital. To this end, I will first analyze the “piglet” also known as “tranca” the room reserved for the unruly patients who resist engaging with the mental institution’s drug-centered treatment. However, far from being a deviation, the “piglet” is, itself, as I argue, an extra-legal part of “medida de segurança” (security measure), an alternative to the custodial sentence for those who are unimputable or semi-imputable. To analyze the political and affective dimensions of this “figure”, it was necessary to understand how it is inscribed in the imaginary of the patients and workers involved with the “medida de segurança” and what affective circuit it mobilizes. The description of the way workers and interns interpret the “piglet” brought me to the frontiers of bureaucratic rationality. Reflecting on this boundary, I evaluate the unique way in which the State designs its writing when challenged by events whose boundaries between the perceived and the imagined are blurred. Secondly, I describe the way in which this affective circuit shapes the predominant mode of care in the mental institution, in which the apparently distinct logics of assistance and control converge. By exploring the perceptual frameworks and the affective circuit present in the institution, I describe how different interpretations of the interns feed different regimes of intelligibility that give rise to various modes of normative intervention over their bodies.