Abstract

CASTRILLON VALDERRUTEN, María del Carmen. Institutional discourses on the family in Brazil and Colombia: To biologize, to nuclearize, or to recognize diversity?. Rev.latinoam.cienc.soc.niñez juv [online]. 2007, vol.5, n.1, pp.83-124. ISSN 1692-715X.

Discourses on the family in the international circuit of protection and assistance institutions for poor boys, girls and adolescents in Brasilia (Brazil), and Cali (Colombia), are developed in a field of ideological conflict on how the family is and how it should be as a space where social relations that guarantee citizenship rights to children and adolescents are produced and preserved. This paper is placed in this controversial field, and analyzes the discourses of some persons from institutions that belong to this intervention circuit: university technicians, community agents and institutionalized boys, girls and adolescents. Although these discourses show signs of placing the family in a democratic perspective, the point of departure is the reality of the diversity of its composition; its biological and nuclear character is still defended, and this defines the way in which these representations of the family are related to protection practices that have profound (social and moral) symbolic effects on the life of institutionalized boys, girls and adolescents. Thus they so construe their childhood and their adolescence, imprisoned, among other things, in these almost mythical, and yet so modern, values, of a consanguineous and nuclear family, even though they cannot leave the perverse circularity of State protection and assistance that does nothing to generate post-institutional relatios within a logic of citizenship rights.

Keywords : Institutional discourse; family; institutional subjects; biological; nuclear; institutional circularity; institutionalized children; institutionalized adolescents.

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