Presented in-person and online. Zoom details below.

Why are Brazilian men’s prisons saturated with anxieties about motherhood? Drawing on my forthcoming book—Where the Sun Rises Square: Mass Incarceration and the Binds of Reform in Brazil (Stanford University Press, November 2025)—this presentation follows incarcerated cisgender men, their families, and prison workers as each grapple with the meaning, weight, and redemptive potential of a mother’s love. I argue that invocations of motherhood point to a specific problem-space that both explains men’s failings and presents a solution to their ungovernability. Social workers, evangelical missionaries, public defenders and others routinely offer themselves up as maternal figures for a largely Black prison population; in doing so, they also bring into relief the racist genealogy behind the lingering question of who is a worthy mother. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Rio’s prisons, the presentation charts expressions and discourses of motherhood that give form to the care, violence and infantilisation running through Brazil’s project of mass incarceration.

Speaker:

David Thompson is an anthropologist, whose work engages with Brazilian prisons and the futures that contemporary incarceration anticipates, calls forth, or forecloses. He holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and was, until recently, an Associate Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University.

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/84128620477?pwd=fRLFaoWlZw7kKJzZZWlCIavoO2pHOX.1