Abstract
This article examines how Cuarto de desechos and Diário de Bitita, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, turn the everyday experience of hunger and illness into a bodily archive that renders suffering legible as a historical and social problem. Through a close textual reading of the diaristic form, it advances the concept of the “body-archive” to describe the material inscription of abandonment —fatigue, infections, malnutrition— and its transformation into record. It then analyzes sanitary injury as a technology of inferiorization structured by race and class, which the diary exposes as evidence of an unequal regime of recognition and care. The article argues that this writing does more than document precarity: it enacts a form of narrative sovereignty that contests the meaning of stigma, reorders the frames through which certain lives become visible, and asserts authority over lived experience.