Mothers deprived of motherhood: biopolitics, reproductive (in)justice and new knowledge on poverty

Abstract

This article deals with mothers who have been deprived by the justice system, because they were considered negligent, incapable, vulnerable, because they did not correspond to biopolitical prescriptions and the normative ideal of motherhood. We interpret the application of this legal mechanism as the effect of a set of strategies of power and knowledge put into action in the reproductive arena on specific subjects, reinforcing inequalities of gender, race, class and territory. To this end, first of all we carried out an analysis of legal texts and historical research on the management and institutionalization of minors in the first half of the 20th century, showing how this project of disciplining poor and racialized children operated through the moral control exercised over their families. From a contemporary perspective, we present a quantitative survey carried out in the case of destitution actions in a Child and Youth Court in the eastern region of São Paulo, between 2018 and 2021, revealing the totality of mothers among the people destitute, and the prevalence of black women, heads of single-parent families, in situations of extreme material poverty and without access to justice. We sought to interpret this picture of successive dispossession and violations against mothers through the concept of reproductive governance and the paradigm of reproductive justice, in order to broaden the debate on reproductive rights, adoption and motherhood, to include in its horizon the complaints and demands for equity and social justice from groups crossed by intersectional oppressions.