Gestate and managing the vulnerability of women in street situations: links between gender, street trajectory, drugs and maternities

Abstract

The compulsory removal of babies from homeless women is a discussion that has deepened in Brazil and is gradually being connected to other issues, such as poverty, use of alcohol and other drugs, mental suffering, gender, race and public policies. Based on a study carried out in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais), we intend to show how the categories “vulnerability” and “risk” come to occupy centrality in the processes of administration and protection of children and families. Thus, the objective of the article is to investigate the moral transformation of the discussion, that is, how the terms used in the clash, “users of alcohol and other drugs” and/or “women/mothers in situations of social vulnerability”, in practice, do not necessarily guarantees the rights of women living on the streets. From the field of gender studies and their intersectionalities and the anthropology of state administration practices, on the one hand, ways of producing, managing and/or neutralizing moral judgments will be analysed, as well as to build the figure of a person destitute of rights. On the other hand, the management modalities that have been carried out by mechanisms of regulation and accountability singularized in the maternal figure will be explored. such as the Childhood and Youth Court, Public Defender’s Office, Unified Health System and Unified Social Assistance System services. In this sense, the article focuses on the street situation, but apprehends it from a political perspective greatly expanded, as it investigates the public actors that generate and regulate the “vulnerability” of women on the streets.