“I Did Not Want to Leave Prison”

Life History and Forms of Resistance of a Trans Woman within the Carceral Apparatus in Ecuador

Abstract

This article examines the life trajectory of Joana Monserrat, a trans woman, in order to understand how historical logics of control and exclusion over trans bodies are configured and re-signified within the prison context. From a socio-historical and critical perspective, it explores the background of processes of criminalization, moral regulation, and institutional violence that shaped the public presence of dissident bodies in Ecuador during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, providing a framework for interpreting a situated experience of confinement.

Drawing on a qualitative case study design and a semi-structured interview, the article reconstructs Joana Monserrat’s experiences before, during, and after imprisonment, highlighting the institutional mechanisms that produce exclusion, as well as the everyday strategies of negotiation, agency, and resistance developed in relation to the carceral order. The analysis brings together contributions from critical legal theory, sexuality studies, and Foucauldian perspectives on power, showing that the decriminalization of homosexuality did not entail the disappearance of technologies of control over dissident bodies, but rather their transformation into new institutional spaces and practices.

The life trajectory examined reveals that the prison constitutes a dispositif in which violence, hierarchies, and mechanisms of gender regulation converge, but also a space where forms of survival, the construction of bonds, and the affirmation of identity emerge. Thus, this article seeks to understand trans experiences in contexts of confinement through a situated perspective that recognizes both structures of domination and the agential capacities of those who inhabit carceral spaces.