This article seeks to explore the punishment–body relation by looking at women’s experience of imprisonment and their embodied identities. It traces the situational construction of bodies and subjectivities, and maps changes in women’s self-perceptions and body-image in and out of prison. Through examples from a qualitative study I conducted with women who experienced punishment in England, I show that while punishment targets the prisoner’s body and often succeeds in inscribing and stigmatizing it with painful experiences and scarred identities, the prisoner maintains a sense of subjectivity and self in custody through her body. She relies on it to make sense of her lived experiences, to survive punishment and often to resist its lasting effects, and uses it to reconstruct and manage an ambivalent, embodied identity. From this perspective, I propose that the prisoner body is understood as both the object and as the subject of modern punishment.
ButlerJ. (1993). Bodies that matter. London, England: Routledge.
14.
CarlenP. (1983). Women’s imprisonment: A study in social control. London, England: Routledge.
15.
CarlenP. (1998). Sledgehammer: Women’s imprisonment in the millennium. London, England: Macmillan.
16.
CarlenP. (Ed.). (2002a). Women and punishment: The struggle for justice. Devon, UK: Willan.
17.
CarlenP. (2002b). Carceral clawback: The case of women’s imprisonment in Canada. Punishment & Society, 4, 115-121.
18.
ChamberlenA. (2016). Embodying prison pain: Women’s experiences of self-injury in prison and the emotions of punishment. Theoretical Criminology, 20, 205-219.
19.
FraserM.GrecoM. (2005). The body: A reader. London, England: Routledge.
GarlandD. (2001). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
22.
GatensM. (1996). Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power and corporeality. London, England: Routledge.
23.
GelsthorpeL. (2004). Back to basics in crime control: Weaving women. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 7(2), 76-103.
24.
GelsthorpeL. (2006). Counterblast: Women and criminal justice: Saying it again, again and again. The Howard Journal, 45, 421-424.
25.
GelsthorpeL.MorrisA. (2002). Women’s imprisonment in England and Wales: A penal paradox. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 2, 277-301.
26.
GiddensA. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
27.
GoffmanE. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. London, England: Penguin.
28.
GoffmanE. (1968). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoilt identity. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
29.
GroszE. (2005). Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
30.
Hannah-MoffatK. (2001). Punishment in disguise: Penal governance and federal imprisonment of women in Canada. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Toronto University Press.
31.
Hannah-MoffatK. (2010). Sacrosanct or flawed: Risk, accountability and gender-responsive penal politics. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 22, 193-215.
32.
HeddermanC. (2010). Government policy on women offenders: Labour’s legacy and the coalition’s challenge. Punishment & Society, 12, 485-500.
33.
HeidensohnF.SilvestriM. (2012). Gender and crime. In MaguireM.MorganR.ReinerR. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (5th ed., pp. 336-369). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
34.
HoweA. (1994). Punish and critique: Towards a feminist analysis of penality. London, England: Routledge.
35.
LederD. (1990). The absent body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
36.
LederD. (2004). Imprisoned bodies: The life world of the incarcerated. Social Justice, 31(1/2), 51-66.
37.
MeloniM.WilliamsS. J.MartinP. (Eds.) (2016). Biosocial matters: Rethinking sociology-biology relations in the twenty-first century. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
38.
Merleau-PontyM. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. London, England: Psychology Press.
39.
MesserschmidtJ. W. (1999). Making bodies matter: Adolescent masculinities, the body, and varieties of violence. Theoretical Criminology, 3, 197-220.
40.
MesserschmidtJ. W. (2012). Gender, heterosexuality and youth violence: The struggle for recognition. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield.
41.
MoiT. (1999). What is a woman and other essays. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
42.
MoranD. (2012). Prisoner reintegration and the stigma of prison time inscribed on the body. Punishment & Society, 14, 564-583.
43.
NettletonS.WatsonJ. (1998). The body in everyday life. London, England: Routledge.
44.
PhillipsC.EarleR. (2010). Reading difference differently? Identities, epistemology and prison ethnography. British Journal of Criminology, 50, 360-378.
45.
ShillingC. (2003). The body and social theory. London, England: Sage (Original work published 1993)
46.
ShillingC. (2005). Embodiment, emotions and the foundations of social order: Durkheim’s enduring contribution. In AlexanderJ.SmithP. (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Emile Durkheim (pp. 211-238). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
SykesG. (1958). The society of captives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
49.
TynerK. E.OgleJ. P. (2008). Feminist theory and the dressed female body: A comparative analysis and applications for textiles and clothing scholarship. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 27, 98-121.
50.
WahidinA. (2002). Reconfiguring older bodies in the prison time machine. Journal of Aging and Identity, 7, 177-193.
51.
WahidinA. (2004). Older women and the criminal justice system: Running out of time. London, England: Jessica Kingsley.
52.
WahidinA.TateS. (2005). Prison (e)
scapes and body tropes: Older women in the prison time machine. Body & Society, 11(2), 59-79.
