Embodying Punishment: Emotions, Identities, and Lived Experiences in Women's Prisons
Embodying
Punishment offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of women's
lived experiences of imprisonment in England. It puts forward a feminist
critique of the prison, arguing that prisoner bodies are central to our
understanding of modern punishment, and particularly of women's
survival and resistance during and after prison. Drawing on a feminist
phenomenological framework informed by a serious engagement with
scholars such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Erwin
Goffman, Michel Foucault, Sandra Lee Bartky and Tori Moi, Embodying
Punishment revisits and expands the literature on the pains of
imprisonment, and offers an interdisciplinary examination of the
embodiment and identities of prisoners and former prisoners, pressing
the need for a body-aware approach to criminology and penology. The book
develops this argument through a qualitative study with prisoners and
former prisoners, discussing themes such as: the perception of the
prison through time, space, smells and sounds; the change of prisoner
bodies; the presentation of self in and after prison, including the
centrality of appearance and prison dress in the management of prisoner
and ex-prisoner identities; and a range of coping strategies adopted
during and after imprisonment, including prison food, drug misuse, and a
case study on women's self-injuring practices. Embodying Punishment
brings to the fore and critically analyses longstanding and urgent
problems surrounding women's multifaceted oppression through
imprisonment, including matters of discriminatory and gendered treatment
as well as issues around penal harm, and argues for an experientially
grounded critique of punishment.
