This dissertation offers an ethnographic social history of the emergence of the "problem" of street children during Brazil's slow transition from military dictatorship to democracy. Via an examination of legislation, social welfare policy, popular media, and the Brazilian public imagination, the dissertation highlights the ways in which unsupervised children have surfaced as a social concern throughout Brazilian history in moments of political crisis in which historically marginalized groups have been granted greater access to social rights and to political freedom. Specifically, the dissertation seeks to understand the ways that children's rights discourse has recently contributed to the social exclusion (and physical death) of certain classes of children by reconfiguring dominant Brazilian notions of normative childhood and humanity to accord with the standards and demands of neoliberalization.

Examining the construction of the category of the street child from multiple angles, this project questions how—and why—street children have come to stand for all that is not "proper" to normative notions of Brazilian childhood. It asks: Why has the legal recognition of street children exacerbated their social death? Could the increasing social exclusion—and physical elimination—street children are subject to be a consequence of their becoming nominal subjects of rights? And, if this is the case, what can kids who live on the streets of Brazil expect from discourses and practices of children's rights that are based on their exclusion?