The pathologization of the feminine: gender, crime and madness – case studies of women admitted to the Barbacena Judicial Institution

Abstract

The Barbacena Judicial Institution (MJB) began to admit patients as of June1929. As the third Brazilian judicial institution, and the first one in the state of MinasGerais, it was part of a reform carried out to improve care for the mentally ill people ofMinas Gerais who had been suffering ill-treatment since the beginning of the century.This article, which is the result of a doctoral research still in progress, aims to analyzethe expert reports of inmates of the MJB who committed crimes of passion. It intends tounderstand how criminological medical knowledge was created in Minas Gerais, duringa period in which several changes occurred in the psychiatric and criminological fields,connected to the gender debate. Out of the 163 expert reports examined to date, themajority of which consists of offenses committed by male farmers (a higher incidence ofhomicides), we have 14 cases of females, from which we separated three cases that stoodout until now due to their similarities and also to the debates that they have arousedamong MJB experts, especially regarding the reaction to the crimes that these womencommitted. For this, we divided our article into four parts: (i) the medicalization of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, (ii) methodological presentation ofthe research, (iii) case analysis, (iv) relationships between madness, gender and crime.