Death at a distance:

an ethnography of mothers, bereavement and prison.

Abstract

This work addresses the treatment that some Argentine prisons give to the bodies that pass through prisons from the perspective of detained women and their relatives. The proposal consists of exploring some stories linked to the ways in which mothers have gone through the deaths of their sons in the context of prison. It explores how violence is produced and reproduced in Argentine prisons and what the role of women is as detainees or family members in dealing with this pain. How is death processed when prison imposes its borders? What are the roles that men and women assume to process this pain? It also explores the specific ways of desubjectivizing pain that prison aims to impose, with the purpose of reflecting on the affective forms that people construct even in these contexts. The article is based on fieldwork begun ten years ago with relatives of detainees. It is a multi-situated ethnography that follows people linked to penal institutions. Fieldwork also included life histories with women deprived of liberty in a prison in the province of Buenos Aires.