(For Class use only! A revised version appears in:
Violence Against Women, 2002. 8(March): 403-412).
Standing on Standpoint:
Challenging Symbolic Violence in Prisoner Culture Research
(29 August, 2001)
Jim Thomas
Department of Sociology
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Illinois
(815) 756-3839 jthomas@math.niu.edu
ABSTRACT
Too often, scholars in the United States write as if anything worth
analyzing existed only between the east and west coasts. In the case
of prison research, the problem is worse: Not only do many of us omit
European and other scholars from our scholarship, but we tend to write
as if women's perison experience is at best an afterthought to our own
work, or at worst irrelevant. The result is a type of symbolic
violence in which images of prisoners in general and women in
particular are ripped from their context and chopped and distorted,
leaving us only with a partial understanding of the social processes
of gender, control, and existence in prison culture. Therefore, it's
both refreshing and ironic that a non-American feminist-oriented
scholar has provided a volume that not only expands the empirical
understanding of women's prison culture, but also expands the
conceptual and theoretical tools for examining the experiences of men.
==================================
"Standing on Standpoint:"
"Subverting Symbolic Violence in Prisoner Culture Research"
On occasion, turn-about is more than fair play. It's deliciously
ironic, as Mary Bosworth's volume illustrates. For once, rather than
have a study of men's prisons that then becomes a model imposed on the
female experience, Bosworth provides a study of women that provides
theoretical and conceptual guidelines not only for expanding studies
of the male experience, also for broader gender issues beyond the walls.
But, her cutting-edge research does more than this. It reminds us
that even when tightly controlled, people possess ways to resist
control and attempt to create an environment more to their liking.
Bosworth's analysis of culture in three English women's prisons
illustrates a paradox: The conventional idealized images of
heterosexual femininity that function as part of the punishment
process also become a means for women to resist control and survive
their prison experience. She argues that an idealized notion of
femininity underlies much of the daily routine of women's prisons, but
that it has an contradictory and ironic outcome. While the inds
idealizations bind women in a position of weakness, it also produces
the possibility for resistance (Bosworth, 1999: 107).
Bosworth's exemplary critical ethnography helps soften the jagged
edges of the gender gap in criminal justice scholarship by reversing
the long-standing tradition of looking at women's prison culture
through the conceptual lens used to study men's.
The "gender gap" in criminal justice generally refers to the manner in
which women and their issues are posed as secondary to, or subsumed
under, those of men, by scholars and policy makers. For example, one
criticism of research on women's prisoner culture is the tendancy to
apply concepts or theories used to study men's prison culture and
experiences those of women. Whether fully accurate or not, the
perception is that, by using a research lens aimed primarily at men,
we obscure from our vision how women's experiences may differ.
While recognizing the "matrix of domination" of class, race, and
gender, she avoids using it as what Schwalbe, (2000: 441)
have labeled "labor-saving reifications" that serve as explanatory
variable. She instead uses them to describe what in fact are
"routinized forms of thought, speech, and action through which some
people attempt to dominate and exploit others." Bosworth's work not
only adds empirical weight to our understanding of women's prison
experience, but she also offers a new research discourse that helps
mediate the conceptual and theoretical violence that characterizes
prison research for both males and females.
THE NATURE OF SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE
Normally, most of us do not perceive research activity itself as an
act of violence. Yet, in subtle ways, uncritical conventional
scholarship imposes, ruptures, distorts, and twists our cognition, and
subsequently our actions, forcefully and with often injurious
consequences.
Most gender-oriented research on prisons and prison culture continues
to conceptualize gender as conceptually dichotomous. Goffman (1977:
302), for example, observed that in all societies, infants at birth
are placed in one of the two sex classes that contain the symbolic
repertoire for constituting and reinforcing them:
In modern industrial society, as apparently in all others,
sex is at the base of a fundamental code in accordance with
which social interactions and social structures are built
up, a code which also establishes the conceptions
individuals have concerning their fundamental human nature
(Goffman, 1977: 301).
However, to view gender as a set of bipolar, even if occasionally
over-lapping, categories, misses the nature of gender-as-process. As
Connell (1987: 140) reminds us, gender is not an over-riding social
dichotomy, but a concept that links social categories. Examples of
such social linkages include wives, abuse victims, scholars, social
control agents, and prisoners.
It's certainly no secret that there are substantial differences
between men's and women's prisons. Architecture, staff interaction,
coping mechanisms, and experiencing time typify a few of the
differences (Heffernan, 1972; Pollock, 1995; Pollock-Byrne, 1990).
Most scholars tend to limit their comparative gaze to differences in
organizational decision-making, resource distribution, or broad
adapation mechanisms to the culture. Consequently, we miss the
gender-specific issues that distinguish men from women. But, why does
this constitute violence?
Symbolic violence refers to the power of symbols to impose, devastate,
attack, suppress, and distort ways of seeing, thinking, and talking.
Symbolic violence often can be more devastating than physical attack
to the extent that it imposed and reinforces social harms caused by
class, gender, and other status differences, strengthens social
barriers, and reinforces culturally embedded domination games. In
describing one way that dominant groups can exert their will over
others, Bourdieu (1991: 209-210) observes that symbolic power
presupposes a misrecognition of the violence exercised through it and
depends therefore requires some unrecognized complicity by those on
whom the effect of the violence is exercised.
In research, especially that of prisoners, images of gender and how
they are manipulated by the researcher, can constitute a form of
symbolic violence:
Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power
which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as
legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the
basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force
to those power relations (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 4).
One of the many ways symbolic violence occurs is through
oppressive discourses. Discourses are sets of symbols that we use to
communicate who we are, or who we think we are, the context in which
our existence is located, and how we indend our selves to be
understood as well as how we understand:
Discourse is more than talk and writing. To regulate
discourse is to impose a set of formal or informal rules
about what can be said, how it can be said, and who can say
what to whom (Schwalbe, et. al., 2000: 435).
In prison research, discourses grounded in the sign systems of
gender identity, both as a prison research concept and as a cultural
act to be created and protected by prisoners, provide a form of
symbolic violence for both male and female prisoners. As a cultural
artifact, gender identity imposes metaphors that wrench prisoners out
of their shared humanity and create conditions that exacerbate
qualities such as animosity, distrust, and predation. For scholars,
gender conceptual images are violent because they arbitrarily impose
symbols in ways that may grotesquely distort the "reality" of what is
seen and what is signified by what is seen. The distortions reflect
oppressive power relations that promote the interests of the more
powerful. Culturally imposed meanings are political, and the political
meanings of these categories provide a coded text, or an integrated
set of symbols that provide the rules and vocabulary for deciphering
the significance of race, that forcefully shape cultural power and
privilege.
Gender codes are violent because they disrupt the social fabric
and create images that correspond to ideologies of suppression, not so
much of women by men, but by gendered power relations that victimize
both groups, even while empowering one at the expense of the other.
Gender codes are violent because they create structural barriers that
preclude some groups from access to resources readily available to
others. Exclusionary systems of resource allocation influenced by
gender factors add punitive sanctions to prison life. Individual
meanings, norms, expectations, and behavioral strategies such as
violence or withdrawal, combine to form the structural elements of
rules, power, and organization. Research on women's experiences tends
to compound this violence by rupturing the experiences of women both
as woman and as prisoners.
Bosworth's Alternative Discourse
A British-trained Australian scholar, Bosworth's conceptual framework
reflects her eclectic background in history at the University of
Western Australia and subsequent interests in philosophy while
obtaining her doctorate at Cambridge. Her work is informed by a range
of intellectual traditions ranging from feminism, structuralist, and
Marxian-related scholars to conventional prison research. Yet,
despite this diversity, the ideas are well-integrated and sufficiently
streamlined that readers will not suffer from idea-overload.
Bosworth's work suggests ways to both mediate the symbolic
violence of research and to expand our understandings of what
prisoners experience. First, and perhaps most important, she offers
the reader an oppositional discourse, an alternative to the many ways
of viewing and talking about prisons. Unlike earlier discourses that
characterized prison scholarship, such as the early "society of
captives" (Sykes, 1958), or the subsequent clinical diagnoses and
retributive judgment and more recent "new penology" discourse of
probability and risk (Feeley and Simon, 1992), Bosworth offers one
grounded in the existential processes of interactional communication
and gender identity formation.
Second, she implicitly recognizes that there is no single "female
experience." Instead, there women who have diverse experiences that
are shaped by sexuality, gender, class, race, and age, among other
factors. Identity is a verb, not a noun, and it is constantly the
location of negotation, modification, and re-affirmation to balance
the tension between who somen were on the outside and what they are on
the inside. For example, even when under attack by their
identity-status as "prisoner," "most of the prisoners did endorse
aspects of an idealized femininity," especially from their outside
roles as mothers, wives, girlfriends, or daughters, to sustain their
sense of efficacy and self (Bosworth, 1999: 105). However, this is
not a simple process. Bosworth's data reveal a dissonance between
women's experiences of motherhood and the images and ideals allowed in
prison.
Bosworth begins by arguing, somewhat ironically, for adopting
"identity politics" as a new approach for criminology. Rather than
fall into the trap of some standpoint theorists, who take an
essentialist view of knowlege by claiming that only "identity groups"
can understand their own culture, she starts with the processes of
identity formation, negotiation, and implementation. Bosworth begins
with the seemingly simple goal of examining the effects of feminiity
on women in prison. Her task seems simple, as she organizes her
inquiry around several basic questions:
To what extent are practices of imprisonment based on rigid
stereotypes of women" Do the prisoners accept or reject
traditional feminine identities: Is feminity a source of
oppression, or can it also enable resistance? In short, are
the women able to tansform of challenge power relations from
their "embodied" positions, as feminist theorists suggest?
By raising such questions, I am attempting to explain
how the identities of women in prison are constituted by a
variety of changing social relations. As prisoners they
must negotiate discourses of punishment and responsibility,
while as women they are subject to notions of femininity
(Bosworth, 1999: 3).
There is little new in finding that collective and individual
identities of people, especially in stigmatized groups, are works in
process as they are negotiated, resisted, modified, and balanced.
After all, like non-prisoners, prisoners struggle to define, affirm,
and continually negotiate a workable identity. Identities tell us who
we think we are and announces us to others. An identity is not only a
status, but a cue-card that prompts others with short-hand summaries
of what they can expect and how they might respond. Prison identity
is more than an individual self-reference point. It also announces to
others who we are and how we expect to be treated. It can become a
resource and a focal point for competition or conflict.
Bosworth expands such traditional symbolic interactionist models by
viewing identity as:
...the intersection between socio-economic and cultural
frameworks in which we are all located--namely race, gender,
ethnicity, and sexuality, and the more diffuse and imprecise
ways in which people perceive themselves (Bosworth, 1999:
98).
She begins with the premise that the exercise of power and the
practice of imprisonment are always gendered (Bosworth, 1999: 46).
This allows her to develop a framework consistent with feminist
theory, but one that is amenable to examining the male prison
experience as well. Ironically, some critics might miss the value of
her approach, and the point of her work, as did one critic who
complained that there was nothing specifically about women in the
analysis (Phoenix, 2001: 312). However, part of Bosworth's project
lies in attempting to avoid the symbolic violence done to both
research and research subjects in the guise of the dogmatic
theoretical gaze that would rupture our understanding of experiences
of domination and control by focusing solely on experiences unique to
women, and ripping away any glimpse of experiences that might be
shared by men. Her link between identity politics and standpoint
research preserves the value of feminist theory while also
transcending the tendancy toward relativism.
Reconsidering Standpoint
Standpoint research, or the "privileged knowledge thesis," holds that
the views and claims of insiders are more credible than those of
outsiders. Well-meaning white scholars received heated criticism in
the late-1960s and 1970s from those who argued that white experiences
and assumptions narrowed and distorted their research lens when
focused on people of color. This, the critics argued, obscured the
experiences of the subordinate group by producing partial, even
erroneous, understandings. Feminist scholars further refined
standpoint methodology. Dorothy Smith (1987: 112) nicely illustrates
the insider-outsider problem when describing her experience of
watching a "family of indians" on a rail platform in Canada:
The passing of the train provides a metaphor for a kind
distance between observer and observed in which the
observed are silenced (Smith, 1987: 112).
In conceptualizing this "family" of "indians" and in describing
their activity, she replaced others' identities and interpretative
frameworks with her own, thus making others' less visible. Excluding,
distorting, or discrediting the experiences of people we study
provides, at best, only partial understandings. At worst, we recreate
and maintain systems of privilege and domination. Identity politics
provides a way out, because it "emerges out of the struggles of
oppressed or exploited groups" and gives us a standpoint from which to
"critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose and
meaning to struggle" (hooks, 1994: 88-89).
In penology, the "celebration of identity" emerged in part with
radical criminologists who tried to speak for prisoners, and with with
symbolic interactionists, especially ethnographers, who began to give
voice to the targets of social control to express their motivations
and view of the world. This provided an antidote to the dominant
voices of the controllers. More recently, the emergence of "convict
criminology" (Stephens, forthcoming) has mobilized a cadre of
ex-offenders and others who have experienced the dark side of the
law to present what is perceived as an alternative to conventional
corrections scholarship.
But, hooks (1994: 91) expressed some discomfort with the term
"authority of experience," because of its potential to silence and
exclude other voices. Bosworth provides the antitote. Bosworth also
avoids the trap common to some strains of identity-politics research
of simply adding female-as-subject to the data mix, as if that would
overcome the dominance of male-oriented prisoner research (Harding, 1987). She grounds her analysis firmly, but not uncritically, in the feminist
standpoint perspective. Her unique contribution both to theory and
empirical scholarship is the expansion of standpoint and identity
theory in a way that avoids the potential relativism of identity
privilege by recognizing that, like the concepts of race, gender and
class on which she builds, idealized sexual identities in prisons
become a power chit. For example, reinterpretion of idealized
femininity can "re-present aspects of a biological and passive feminity
to confront and shift the administration" (Bosworth, 199: 148-149),
which illustrates the irony that gender identities that oppress are
also weapons of resistance. Bosworth thereby avoids the dichotomous
trap common to some strains of idenity-politics research of simply adding
female-as-subject to the data mix, as if that would overcome the
dominance of male-oriented discourses.
Bosworth's root imagery lies in the oppositional dichotomy between
free will and determism as illustrated by the paradoxical role of
femininity in constructing women as both dependent and autonomous
(Bosworth, 1999: 32-33). Bosworth translates the paradox into a
cutting-edge way of examining the relationship between punishment,
imprisonment, social organization, and resistance, one on which the prison
becomes a metaphor for broader forms of social regulation. This expands
the empirical limits of women's cultures in several ways that can
powerfully shape studies of men's institutions.
First, she adds support to those who have warned against seeing a
unified "prisoner culture" in either men's or women's prisons (Heffernan,
1972; Jones and Schmid, 2000; Kruttschnitt, Gartner, and Miller, 2000).
The term suggests at least minimal homogeneity of members' norms, values,
ideologies, and understandings, including those of gender roles and
expectations, a misconception fostered especially by older research on
men's prisons, and later transported into studies of women's institutions.
By focusing on the dialectical process between prisoners' agency and
broader institutional, societal, and cultural structure, her data
illustrate the diversity and permeability of prisons' cultural boundaries
and meanings.
Second, by shifting the focus of analysis from prison culture to
processes of agency and identity formation, Bosworth avoids the generally
unfruitful dichotomy of explaining prison culture through either the
importation or deprivation models. For Bosworth, whether "bad folks" bring
their bad-guy culture with them into the prison as so much baggage
(importation model), or whether the culture is the result of normal
attempts to adapt to the abnormal deprivations of a debilitating prison
culture (deprivation model) is irrelevant. Instead, her study displays the
mix of factors from both within and outside the prison that are used as
building blocks in the interactional processes of shaping, adapting to, and
resisting the pains of confinement.
Third, Bosworth also avoids reifying the entrenched concept of the
"inmate code," that set of entrenched and inviolable norms presumed to
provide fairly inviolable standards for male prisoner behavior (Sykes,
1958). While not denying the existence of shared norms, Bosworth
illustrates how one mechanism, gender-based conceptions of femininity,
provide a perhaps deeper and more powerful set of codes for doing time.
Finally, too often ethnograpies, even the most critical kind, commit
the violence of rupturing the researcher from the people being studied in
what Van Maanen (1988: 46) calls "realist tales." In realist tales, the
author vanishes from the finished text, making the reader dependent on the
author's experiential authority with no opportunity to reflect on the
researcher-researched process. In the spirit of recent ethnographies in
which scholars recognize the necessity of reflexively locating the author's
field experience within the research setting and the subject, Bosworth
preceeds her analysis with a detailed discussion both of her methods and
her relationship with the prisoners. In so doing, she reflexively clarifies
her own ideological lens and allows readers to examine how her intellectual
and experiential development unfolds as she proceeds. Most qualitative
researchers of prison culture know, but few report, the physical and
emotional toll their studies take. If we did, there might be fewer
first-hand studies. Unlike most of us who have studied prisoners, Bosworth
almost brutally describes the costs of her inquiry:
There were physical symptoms--my skin and hair quality
deteriorated; I had nightmares. At one stage, near the end, I
even began to have heart palpitations. There were behaviorial
symptoms--I smoked a lot more than usual, and drank in the
evenings. I would frequently cry as I was driving away from the
prison (Bosworth, 1999: 74).
Bosworth's commentary is more than a true confessional tale. It's an
example of "criminological Verstehen," which bridges the conventional
dualisms between research subject and object by utilizing the researcher's
own experiences and emotions as avenues into the meanings of the situation
and the experiences of the subjects (Ferrell and Hamm, 1998: 13). Through
such methodological musings, Bosworth combines the standpoint both of her
subjects and of her own status as a female researcher to give voice to her
subjects by entering their world while retaining her own external critical
feminist edge.
These examples illustrate how Bosworth's focus on gender and identity
builds a conceptual and theoretical model for examining the relationship
between human agency, prisoner culture, prisoner interaction, social
control, and resistance. By integrating the topics of prison culture and
gender, she provides an eclectic way of studying each, which moves us
beyond the rather static viewing of either one.
CONCLUSION
Bosworth opens her volume with an insightful reminder that we often
begin research with a poorly formulated question that, through struggle,
helps us answer a question that could not have been properly asked at the
start. From an amorphous beginning comes partial clarity as our foggy
images become clearer. Bosworth's conclusion suggests that we ought not
become deluded in believing that these clearer images are sufficient.
Criminologists, she argues, must continually listen to others' voices,
recognize the dialectic between resistance and control, and then search for
avenues by which resistance can go "somewhere in particular." I would add
that only in this manner can we, as researchers, begin to reduce the
symbolic violence resulting from our failure to heed Bosworth's call.
Connell (1987: 17) reminds us that "personal life and collective
social arrangements are linked in a fundamental and constitutive way." His
point is that theoretical integration of each is necessary in the process
of understanding our collective and individual social existence and
transforming that understanding into practice. Multiple audiences (or
stakeholders) present the challenge of multiple standpoints of the personal
and collective experience both in men's and women's prisons. The research
trick is to recognize the dialectical process that privileges not the
claims of one audience over another, but recognizes research as the
processes of dialogue as a dialectical project between all participants.
As hooks (1994: 130) observes:
To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as
teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries,
the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender,
class, professional standing, and a host of other differences.
As Bosworth cogently illustrates, that's one way to begin reducing
symbolic violence in prisoner culture studies or, for that matter, most
other research as well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bosworth, Mary. 1999. Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women's
Prisons. Aldershot (Eng.): Ashgate/Dartmouth.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge (Mass.):
Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in
Education, Society and Culture. Beverly Hills: SAGE.
Collins, Patrica Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford
University Press.
Feeley, Malcolm M. and Jonathan Simon. 1992. "The New Penology: Notes on
the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and its Implications. Criminology,
30(4): 449-474.
Ferrell, Jeff and Mark S. Hamm. 1998. "True Confessions: Crime, Deviance,
and Field Research." Pp. 2-19 in J. Ferrell and M. Hamm (eds.),
Ethnography at the Edge: Crime, Deivance and Field Research. Boston:
Northeastern University Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1977. "The Arrangement between the Sexes." Theory and
Society, 4(1977): 301-331.
Harding, Sandra. 1987. "Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?" Pp.
1-14 in S. Harding (ed.), Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington (Ind.):
Indiana University Press.
Heffernan, E. 1972. Making it in Prison: The Square, the Cool and the Life.
New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Jones, S. Richard and Thomas J. Schmid. 2000. Doing Time. Prison
Experience and Identity Among First-Time Inmates. Stamford (Conn.): JAI
Press.
Kruttschnitt, Candace, Rosemary Gartner and Amy Miller. 2000. "Doing her
own Time? Women's Responses to Prison in the Context of the Old and the
New Penology." Criminology, 38(August): 681-717.
Phoenix, Joanna. 2001. "Review: Bosworth, Mary, Engendering Resistance:
Agency and Power in Women's Prisons." Punishment and Society, 3(April):
310-312.
Schwalbe, Michael, Sandra Godwin, Daphne Holden, Douglas Schrock,
Shealy Thompson, and Michele Wolkomir. 2000.
"Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist
Analysis. Social Forces, 79(2): 419-452.
Stephens, Richard. 2001. Convict Criminology. Belmont (Calif): Wadsworth.
Sykes, Gresham M. 1958. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum
Security Prison. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales from the Field: On Writing Ethnography.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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