Abstract
The paper investigates the ways of disciplining of homosexuality and race in the urban area of Rio de Janeiro from the reflection on the film "Madame Satã" (2002). It shows the life of João Francisco dos Santos, real and mythical character of Rio’s trickster culture, who represented the primary target of repressive practices and the “cleansing” of urban spaces, where the ones marginalized by the abolition without racial inclusion, the populations especially excluded by urban reforms of the beginning of the century and the deviants from the heteronormativity lived together. We want to show how legislative, institutional and even illegal practices, alongside with the scientific discourse, linked race and deviant sexuality. It is argued that race and punishment, since the formation of colonialism, compose a "device", in the terms of Michel Foucault, implying an exchange constitutive of meanings and social practices. Therefore, the criminal justice system would not be just accidentally discriminatory. As racism is fundamental to the power relations that specify the forms of punishment, the structure of punishment itself composes the race as a social construct in its negative sense. Finally, beyond the essentializing perspective, it is proposed that the character exemplifies the disagreement between the complexity of social roles and the dominant forms of demarcation of masculinity.
racism; control; sexuality; criminal system