Vanessa Sanders Spotlight: When Protection Becomes Expansion: LGBTQ+ Rights and the Brazilian Carceral State

When anthropologist Vanessa Sander, the Spring 2026 Lemann Visiting Scholar at DRCLAS, first began working with transgender women engaged in sex work in her hometown in Brazil, she noticed a recurring pattern.  

One week, a woman would be working on the street. The next, she had disappeared. 

When Sander asked what had happened, the answers were matter-of-fact. 

"She probably got arrested." 

"She's in jail." 

For the women she came to know, the constant movement between the street and prison was so common that it had a name: ping-pong. 

That observation became the starting point for years of ethnographic research into the intersections of gender, sexuality, and incarceration in Brazil. During a recent DRCLAS research colloquium, Sander, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, presented findings from her project, "A Suicide Wave in the LGBT Wing": Gender, Sexuality and the Management of Life and Death in the Prison System, exploring how reforms designed to protect LGBTQ+ incarcerated people can unintentionally reinforce the prison system itself.  

Brazil's first LGBT prison wing was established in 2009 in the state of Minas Gerais in response to widespread violence against LGBTQ+ incarcerated people, particularly transgender women. Widely celebrated as an innovative human rights initiative, the model attracted attention from across Brazil and abroad as an example of progressive prison reform.  

When Sander began her fieldwork nearly a decade later, however, she encountered a very different reality. 

Rather than describing the unit as a success, prison administrators repeatedly referred to it as being in crisis. The wing had become overcrowded, violence persisted, and the same structural problems affecting Brazil's broader prison system had begun to emerge inside what was intended to be a protected space. 

For Sander, the repetition of the word crisis became a research question in itself. 

"When does crisis stop being a turning point and become a permanent condition?" she asked during her presentation.  

As conditions deteriorated throughout Brazil's prison system, increasing numbers of incarcerated men requested transfers into the LGBT wing—not necessarily because they identified as LGBTQ+, prison officials argued, but because the conditions there were perceived as safer. 

The requests forced prison administrators to confront an unexpected question: Who belongs? 

Officials debated who was "really" gay or transgender and even asked Sander whether, as an anthropologist, she could help determine who qualified for admission. 

She declined. 

Instead, she observed how the prison's focus shifted from addressing overcrowding and violence to policing identity itself. Categories originally intended to protect vulnerable populations had become tools of prison administration, revealing how institutions can transform social identities into bureaucratic classifications.  

Another finding challenged assumptions about what protection should look like. 

As policymakers proposed transferring transgender women to women's prisons, many expected the change to be welcomed. Instead, most transgender women chose to remain where they were. 

The reason was not a rejection of their gender identity but an acknowledgment of the relationships they had built. Having often experienced rejection from their families before incarceration, many had formed intimate partnerships and support networks that provided emotional connection as well as access to basic necessities. 

Sander recounted one story that remained with her throughout her fieldwork. 

One incarcerated man saved the bread from his breakfast every day for two months so he could exchange it for a bottle of shampoo as a birthday gift for his transgender partner. 

The gesture illustrated the scarcity of prison life, but also the profound forms of care and mutual support that emerged within it. It also underscored one of Sander's central arguments: policies designed from the outside do not always reflect how incarcerated people themselves understand safety, belonging, and survival.  

As overcrowding intensified, the state's response remained remarkably consistent. 

The LGBT wing expanded into larger pavilions and eventually into an entire prison dedicated to LGBTQ+ incarcerated people. Each expansion was presented as evidence of humanitarian progress, yet each new facility quickly confronted many of the same structural challenges it had been created to solve. 

Even after a series of deaths and suicide attempts prompted legal investigations and public scrutiny, institutional responses focused largely on administrative procedures rather than systemic change. For Sander, these moments reveal how prisons can absorb criticism while leaving the underlying structures of incarceration largely intact.  

Rather than arguing against protections for LGBTQ+ incarcerated people, Sander asks a broader question: How do humanitarian reforms reshape, and sometimes strengthen, the institutions they seek to reform? 

By following the everyday experiences of transgender women in Brazil's prison system, her research challenges conventional understandings of prison reform and demonstrates how ethnographic research can illuminate the complex relationship between care, governance, identity, and the expansion of the carceral state.