Reading Ourselves: Self-Documentation, Infamy, and Collective Health in Brazilian Peripheries

This paper explores self-documentation as a social instrument for surviving misrecognition and constructing situated forms of care. Drawing from Foucault’s Lives of Infamous Men, it examines how lives become visible only when touched by power, through brief administrative inscriptions. Building on Documental Fixity (Sanches and Day, 2020), the argument shifts from the stabilizing power of documents to the anticipatory actions of those who know they are read. Rather than asking what a document is, I treat “document” as a modeling frame imposed upon things to manage indexicality. From passports to school uniforms, documentation organizes visibility and authority. In racialized and unequal contexts, subjects actively create their own documentary traces to be read otherwise. I name this anticipatory subject homodocumentum. The analysis proposes double indexicality—the simultaneous condition of being read and rewriting oneself—as a framework for understanding how people transform documentary infrastructures into means of collective agency. The paper concludes with reflections on theatre as a site of self-documentation and health production in Brazilian peripheries.