The Absurdity of Gendered Technologigies of Control
20 June, 2002
From: Gender and Social Control in Women's Prisons, 2003.
Denver: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Oh, sir, you know well that life is full of infinite
absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to
appear plausible, since they are true" (Pirandello, 1922:
7-8).
Surely it cannot be plausible that prison heterosexual norms and gender can
be a technology of oppressive control.
It may seem implausible also that gender-neutral attempts to treat female
prisoners the same as male prisoners by ignoring sex and gender differences
add more layers of punishment to the female carceral experience.
It's equally implausible that many prison researchers, while
challenging the prison conditions that lead to physical violence,
nonetheless promote an equally harmfulful form of symbolic
violence. This violence distorts how we view gender and control
in women's prisons in a game of resistance and accomodation that
reproduces gendered control on both sides of the wall.
Yet, as the contributors to this volume illustrate, it's all
true. In the form of digressions, this introduction lays out a
framework to illustrate how the subsequent empirical chapters,
both individually and in the aggregate, provide an alternative
discourse that displays the implausibilities, or what some might
call the absurd ironies, of (hetero)gendered experiences in women's
prisons.
At first blush, Pirandello has little to do with prisons, with
technology, with surveillance, with domination, or with
gendering, hetero or otherwise. So, of course, this volume isn't
really about Pirandello. It's about reality. Our reality.
Gender reality. The prisoner reality. And mostly, it's about the
absurdity of prison culture, the reality of social control in
women's prisons, and the gendered technologies of
controlling.
Prison Life as Absurd
Prison life, much like life outside the walls, is absurd. An
examination of this absurdity highlights the tensions between
freedom and constraint in a social world comprised of ambiguous
rules, mysterious forces, and no immediately observable remedies
to redress power imbalances. Absurdity, a core existentialist
theme, suggests that social life is inherently permeated with
conditions for which there often seem no rationale solution. One
absurd aspect of the human condition lies in willing accomodation to
cultural constraints that promote unnecessary forms of social
domination in ways that make us unwittingly complicit in our own
subjugation.
Borrowing from Esslin (1961: xix), absurdity refers
to a condition of existence out of harmony with reason, a set of
circumstances devoid of ostensible purpose that makes behavioral
choices futile. An absurd existence is one in which we are unable
to discover the obscurely oppressive meanings and significance of our social
world.
If social existence outside prison walls is absurd, then meaning
and purpose in the social world of prisons are even more so:
Inmates are faced with high-stakes dilemmas in their relation
with those in positions of authority over them. They continue to
exist in an atmosphere of subjugation at best institutionally paternalistic, at
worst systematically repressive and arbitrary.
Females are expected to develop
autonomy and individual responsibility even as gender games
promote passivity and dependence within the prison culture.
Prison conditions symbolize oppressive authority, intensify
powerlessness, and constantly remind prisoners that, even if
they are able to manage the physical deprivations, there is no
escape from daily confrontations with absurd conditions.
The stripping away of the prisoner's identity through a series
of degradations, abasement rituals, humiliations and
profanations (Goffman, 1961: 14-21) also dissolves conventional
frameworks of normalcy that guide and give meaning to
mundane behavior.
This contributes to "learned helplessness"
(Goodstein et. al., 1984), in which
prisoners suffer reduced motivation, "cognitive deficits,"
and a restriction of choices proportional to the loss of control
over their environment and existence.
As a consequence, what outsiders often interpret as abnormal behavior in
prisons instead may reflect attempts of prisoners to
adjust to the absurdity of their environment
(Milovanovic and Thomas, 1989).
Absurdity rises out of this dilemma of restricted freedom
of action and choice on one hand, and the need to successfully
confront debilitating conditions in a regulated environment on the other.
WHAT IS PRISON CULTURE?
Culture is the socially established set of public codes, the
syntax and lexicon, that guide the conventions of "reality
construction" by which we order and legitimize everday roles,
priorities and operating procedures (Berger and Luckmann, 1967:
99). As the totality of all learned social behavior of a given
group, culture provides not only "systems of standards for perceiving,
believing, evaluating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1981: 110), but
includes the rules and symbols of interpretation and discourse as
well. The meaning of culture includes social behavior
and the guiding framework by which cultural members understand
their, and others', behavior. To speak of culture as a
monolithic and invariant "thing" glosses over the cultural work
required to produce the repetitive meanings, invoke interpretive
tools, and recreate a semblance of ordered social existence.
Cultures are produced both by the experiences of everyday
interaction and by specialized culture-producing organizations
(Becker, 1986, 16; Collins, 1979: 60). Culture is a "collective
fiction" (Clifford, 1988: 106) to the extent that it is a shared
social fabrication with meanings that, while seemingly constant, are in
fact ambiguous, tentative, changing, and may vary dramatically
between groups and institutions.
Like the broader culture, the prison culture reflects meanings that are
manufactured, imposed, negotiated, altered, highly structured yet
permeable and amorphous, and provide the codes
for the controllers and those they control for "doing time."
This leads to two broad questions underlying the study of prison
culture. First, what is the relationship between prison culture
and prisoner culture? Hayner and Ash (1939: 362) distinguished
between prison culture, which encompasses staff, civilians,
correctional officers, and others, and prisoner culture, which
reflects norms, language, coping mechanisms, behaviors,
artifacts, and other characteristics shared primarily by
prisoners themselves.
Prisoner culture, by contrast, arises from the combination of
the outside culture modified by prisoners' challenges of adjusting to
and surviving in a world of deprivation and control.
But, the two cultures intertwine, as prisoners
and staff reciprocally create the meaning of each in a dance of
power and control, each providing patterns of mutual expectations,
meanings, and interactional strategies for the other.
In prisons, the cultural work of staff and prisoners, and the
formal and informal structure imposed by state and administrative
personnel combine to create rules and resources that form prison
culture. The rules and social resources are patterned by gender,
and as Owen (1998, 1988)
describes, the gendered culture of prisons is reproduced in a
complex interplay staff and between staff, between prisoners, and
between staff and prisoners.
The second question centers on whether prisoners import their
culture into the prison with them (the importation model), or
whether prisoner culture arises from attempts to adjust to and
resist deprivation and control (the deprivation model). Advocates
of the importation model see prison culture as a product
of behaviors intended to reduce the pains of imprisonment.
Advocates of the importation model argue that
prisons reflect a microcosm of the broader street subculture, and
prisoners build a social world around the norms, values, and
behavior habits that guided them on the streets.
In prisons, where discipline and control are enforced by the
overt asymmetrical power imbalances between and among the keepers
and kept, more subtle but equally powerful forms of
domination remain invisible. Sexual power is one of the most
effective of these hidden mechanisms. One way this occurs is
through the reinforcement of what Ingraham (1994) has called
"heterogendering." This refers to the socially institutionalized
ways in which the
processes and images of heterosexuality become carried out
in ways that, in prisons, reinforce prisoners' identities such that they
become their own control agents.
More simply, heterogendered cultural formations are a technology of
sexual control that in turn leads to self-surveillance, domination,
and control.
Yet, few prison studies have focused on the difference gender
makes in the prison experiences for men and women. The
contributors in this volume redress this by raising a third
question, one that doesn't so much answer as
reconceptualize the first two questions: How does imported
gender-based cultural baggage shape how women prisoners create
and respond to their prison experience and reproduce mechanisms
of control, domination, and even resistance?
In varying ways, each chapter here argues that
both sex and gender combine in ways that help accomodate to
prison deprivations while also providing mechanisms of control
and resistance. The contributors draw
from their research of female prisons
and prisoners to explore how gendered characteristics such as
roles, scripted behaviors, norms, and identity are recreated
behind the walls in ways that reinforce conventional patriarchal
images and policies. Each author illustrates how gender
performances are reinforced in prison in ways that add other
layers of control to the technology of punishment.
GENDER GAMES AS TECHNOLOGY
We do not want to deceive ourselves into thinking that the
technologies of surveillance and control are only electronic or
mechanical. As Foucault (1979) suggested, technology is
more than bells and whistles of the electronic age; it includes
the "technology of culture" in which ideology, cultural icons,
and other symbolic artifacts become implements of self-serveillance and
other forms of control/domination.
Technology, the systematic application of knowledge and skills
to accomplish a specific task, has changed. But, the prison
tasks of imposing control, deprivation, and discipline, have not.
Jeremy Bentham's 19th century panopticon prison, a circular,
multi-tiered open structure with a guard tower in the center, was
a technology designed to provide a single person with visual
access into every cell and prisoner. Survielling prisoners
presumably made prison control more effective and efficient by
increasing discipline while reducing staff resources required to
maintain it. Other than a single cellhouse in Illinois' Stateville
Correctional Center, the
panopticon model has gone the way of the great auk, as more efficient
technological advances continue to penetrate prison design and
operation to control prisoners.
Less visible technologies, some so basic that we
rarely recognize them, contribute to the control and
punitive processes, especially in women's prisons. One example is
gender. The thesis of this volume is that gender constitutes a
technology of control. The panopticon model provides a metaphor
to describe how gender functions to promote staff interests and
subvert the interests of female prisoners.
Like behavior in the old panopticon, gender displays
are always visible, monitored both formally and informally, and
subject to both peer and administrative rewards and sanctions. Doing gender
becomes a type of game in which the players simultaneously win
when they successfully play it to their advantage.
But, it is also a game where players' wins can become losses when
their successes reaffirm both social and institutional forms of
domination by reinforcng a control apparatus that promotes passivity and
dependency both in prison and after release.
Gender as Game
As in most social interaction, games constitute a significant
part of social control. A game is an ongoing series of
complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a
well-defined, predictable outcome (Berne, 1964: 44). For Goffman and
others, games refer not to play, but to a type of interaction
with winners, losers, successes, failures, rules, "cheating," and
often in prisons high stakes. In Goffman's (1969a, 1969b)
development, a game is a metaphor for one type of interaction with "players,"
"position," "moves," and wins and losses (or successes and failures).
As a game, gender performances contain the codes and rules that,
when applied to the ends of punishment and control, become a
powerful technology that generally remains preconscious and
invisible, yet, like gravity or magnetism, forcing us to
accomodate to its logic.
Gender games and identity intertwine,
and these games become part of control contests. In prisons, the
control game, in which one side manipulates the situation to
attain compliance and the other side moves to counter it, is the
most obvious. Doing gender constitutes a type of game in that
displays of gender identity become a chit in status, rewards, or
punishment.
Doing gender becomes a performance, and the rules become scripts
to be followed, ad-libbed, or revised as needed. These scripts,
in turn, become part of the expressive equipment (Goffman, 1959:
22) for creating a front-stage persona, or public identity, for an
audience. In prisons, with multiple audiences and where stakes
are high, gender games become a fundamental part of coping and
survival. Whether the stakes are for information, scarce
resources, as in ingratiating flirtation, for status, as in
linguistic putdowns such as "playing the dozens," or for other
goals, such as social distancing, success in gender gaming
depends on an ability to comprehend cultural nuances in order to
enhance psychological and physical survival.
How well prisoners develop gaming skills effects how they
experience their time. Not all prisoners master gender games
equally, Schmid and Jones (2000) demonstrate how poor gaming
skills among male prisoners mark one as weak, with consequences
that range from minor humiliation to predatory victimization.
When and at whom to smile, the limits of self-revelation, or
sharing histories of abuse or vicitimization with staff or peers,
the subtexts of verbal jousting matches, or learning with whom
one can safely associate are a few examples of the types of
gender-based cultural rules that must be learned quickly. The
prison gender game is thus an extension of a larger gender
survival game played on the streets. The player, whether inside
or outside the walls of the prison, recognizing that her gaming
skills might be out of the ordinary, is constantly aware of the
consequences should she fail to make the right moves.
In a culture fraught with tensions and contradictions, such as
prisons, gaming is complicated by a number of antinomies that
penetrate and mediate meanings and add multiple layers to the
most messages. Girshick (this volume) suggests that appearing too
feminine may put women at risk of staff harassment or worse.
But, just as appearing too feminine in a men's institution can
lead to predatory assaults or intimidation by other prisoners, in
women's prisons, failing to appear sufficiently feminine or
"ladylike" risks sexually-related ridicule by staff or other
inmates, and can lead to a staff-imposed label of "not with the
program," or "an aggressive trouble maker."
As Zaitzow, Girshick, Sharpe, and Bosworth (this volume)
describe, women bring their gendered forms of behavior with them
into the institution. However, the unique demands of prison
control may make many of these behaviors inappropriate,
especially when they reflect dysfunctional backgrounds, such as
victimization by intimates or substance abuse. The gender game then becomes
complicated by the need to learn new rules, including how to
develop a rhetoric of self-expression, construct a new identity
and self-concept of independence and self-reliance even while
submitting to passivity and control, and learning where the
boundaries of appropriate gender expression lie between staff and
other prisoners (McCorkel, 1998). Playing the prison gender game
can thus become a
manipulative exercise in coping, rather than a viable means of
developing ways of doing gender on release. The game of doing
gender thus becomes an integral part of control in which the
complex relationship between identity, expression, and
manipulation become intensified.
The papers in this volume explore aspects of the gender-based
technology of creating and refinorcing the existential barriers
that serve to dominate and control women in prison. Although the
contributions here are not embedded in Foucault, Goffman, or
existentialist writings, they nonetheless illustrate how the basic
themes from these works sharpen the theoretical and conceptual
mechanisms for examining how gender issues shape women's prison
expierences.
The Difference Diffence Makes
It's old news that the conditions and policies of women's prisons
are different than those of men. Considerable evidence also
confirms that incarcerated women experience their incarceration
differently than men. However, less evident is how gender
differences shape policies and experiences of control, and how
gender identity and roles shape women's adapatation and
resistance to prison culture and control. Historically,
gender-based policies shaped many of the differences between
men's and women's prisons, as men's behaviors and needs provided
the model for all prisons. This often led to fewer resources,
gender-stereotyped programming, and inattention to
gender-specific needs such as health care, child care,
post-release preparation, and other issues that affect women more
than men. Most significantly, control mechanisms in prisons and
the corresponding polices, staff training procedures, and
resources tend to be designed to control men, who are more
aggressive, violent, and cope with and experience time
differently, and resolve conflicts more competitively.
One challenge facing both policy makers and researchers is
whether gender and biological differences between men and women
should be recognized more fully and translated into corresponding
prison practices. As Barbara Zaitzow and Esther Heffernan
argue in their chapters
in this volume, the belief that women are innately different than
men shaped the patriarchal systems of carceral control in which
female offenders were viewed as incorrigible "fallen women" who
could be "fixed" by restoring their adherence to and dependence
on traditional images of feminity. Yet, women's biological
differences undeniably create issues that men do not face, such
as pregnancies, hysterectomies, masectomies, and geriatric health
and psychological needs.
Biological differences extend beyond medical issues.
They also add a level of punishment by increasing
powerlessness and uncertainty. For example, in the early 1980s
and early 1990s, women prisoners in Illinois believed that prison
doctors were over-prescribing hysterectomies, allegedly to
generate revenue for local medical personnel. No evidence
supported the belief, but the helplessness and fears women
experienced not only when faced with surgery, but also with the
possibility that "it could happen to me" contributed to distrust
of medical personnel, increased health-related stress, and
reinforced feelings of helplessness and dependency. When women
enter the prison system pregnant, they normally give birth in local
hospitals. The pre-natal anxieties of labor and delivery add to
the stress of the prison experience. In Illinois until the late
1990s, women were shackled to the delivery table while giving
birth. Although no longer practiced, the security procedures
required for transporting women to and from the local hospital,
combined with the close monitoring while in labor and delivery,
increase feelings of powerlessness and anxiety. Mothers with
normal delivery are allowed to stay with their infants for 24
hours, with C-sections for 48 hours. The subsequent separation
can be traumatic, adding additional layers of loneliness and
depression on return to the prison populatation.
In addition to biological differences, incarcerated women also
bring their gender-based baggage with them into the institution.
As the contributors to this volume illustrate, unlike men, women
are more likely to have medical problems exacerbated by substance
abuse, be HIV positive, and face child care and other domestic
problems needing attention while incarcerated. Coupled with the
likelihood that women are likely to come out of abusive
relationships with family or male partners, to be less educated
than male counterparts, and have fewer vocational skills, they
begin their prison experience with less social capital to adjust
to, and cope with, incarceration.
Greer (2002) found that how women prisoners' emotions and ways of
expressing them influence and are influenced by the
environment of prison, which differ dramatically from men's
emotional coping strategies. For women, previous life
experiences shaped by poverty, abuse, drug addiction, and
disregard by significant others hindered their emotional management in
prison (Greer, 2002: 123). These emotional coping techniques,
constructed on the outside, perpetuate gender stereotypes inside
the walls in ways that sustain traditional roles of passivity and
acquiescence to power and domination.
As Bem (1992: 80) observed, gender polarization superimposes a
male-female dichotomy on biological characteristics and on sexuality.
Eliminating essentialism and androcentrism, she contends, is of
itself insufficient to level the gender-game playing field,
because it would leave us with gender polarization.
Therefore, in dealing with "the conundrum of difference"
(Bem, 1992: 177)--balancing the risks of falling into an
essentialist trap of
gendered social construction while also acknowledging fundamental
differences--scholars face a methodological and theoretical
another challenge. How do we recognize
gender differences without recreating the asymmetrical power
relationships that have characterized the treatment of
incarcerated women and that reinforce patterns of gender
domination both during and after release? One way is by
recognizing that treating male and female prisoners identically
does not necessarily lead to equal treatment. The creation and
implementation of policies intended to reduce gender inequality
can have the ironic outcome of exaccerbating the differences,
thus creating a two-tiered, gender-based system of punishment in
which gender becomes a means of controlling and punishing women
to a greater degree than men.
By distinguishing between parity (identical treatment) and equality
("equivalence"), we can see how this occurs.
Equality or Parity?
Especially since the 1970s, scholars and policy makers recognized
that, because they comprised barely five percent of the nation's
prison population, women were the "forgotten offenders."
Influenced by feminist scholars, a
combination of civil rights activists
and prison reformers advocated establishing
parity between male and female prisoners by eliminating
gender-based prison policies and treating both men and women
identically. To some extent, this has occured in the past two
decades, and gender differences have been levelled such that
policies are generally created and applied identically across the board.
However, this may not be sufficient, because policy parity does
not necesarily translate into equality of treatment, especially
when policies continue to be driven by the control imperatives of
males.
Parity denotes gender-neutral quantitative sameness or parallel standards of
equivalence without consideration for mediating factors. The
underlying assumption, quite reasonable on its surface, was
grounded in the belief that, by eliminating gender differences
and applying policies identically across the board, women would
begin receiving resources on a par with men, and their prison
experiences would be less restrictive.
Equality, by contrast, is a qualitative concept suggesting
non-parallel equivalence. Attempts over the past three decades
to improve the conditions of women's prisons and provide
resources and amenities on a par with men has either stressed
parity as a way of subverting gender-based assymetry and
establishing identical standards, or de-emphasized the
distinction between parity and equality.
In the outside world, the "lens of gender" creates a male-centered
set of images in which men's experiences are taken as axiomatic and
superimposed on women as an organizing principle that forges a
cultural connection between sex and other aspects of
human existence (Bem, 1992: 2).
As in the outside world, this translates into prison
policies in which special needs of men are considered axiomatic,
and women's special needs are either treated as special cases of
left unmet (Bem, 1992: 183).
As a consequence,
treating male and female prisoners identically has not resolved
gender disparity, and in some ways has increased it. This requires a
closer look at how women's unique pre-prison, prison, and
post-prison experiences should become part of policy formation.
An single example from Illinois prisons illustrates the
difference between gender parity and equality. In 1999, the
Department of Corrections implemented a policy in which prisoners
were prohibited from wearing street clothes; they could wear only
apparel issued by the prison or purchased from the prison
commisary. At the same time, a second policy specified that all
prisoners' property must fit in two small boxes. The first, a
"property box" slightly bigger than a military footlocker, holds
clothes, commissary items, and other personal belongings. The
second, a "correspondence box" about the size of a small personal
computer, is restricted to papers, letters, and pictures. Books
may be kept in either box. The only property exempt from
property box storage includes authorized electronic items, such as
radios, televisions, typewriters, or fans. The policy was
initially imposed on male prisoners, but concerns about
complaints from men and potential equal protection litigation
contributed to identical application of the policy to women.
However, women's additional sex-based property, such as
undergarments, cosmetics, and feminine hygiene needs exceed those
of men, leaving them with more items to store in identical space.
Therefore, policy parity trumps equality, because the policy
places greater hardship on women, one seemingly minor but
nonetheless substantial.
The contributors here illustrate how women's experiences
of prison, and how they cope with confinement, reflects their
gender-based experiences in the outside world. Past
victimization and abuse, culturally defined ways of coping with
problems and interacting with others, cultural ways of
encouraging traditional "gender-appropriate" behaviors, and
women's strategies for adapting to social control are a few aspects of
their previous existence that women bring into the prison with them.
As Wheeler et. al. (1989) have shown, women's legal needs reflect
these pre-prison experiences and differ from the legal needs of men.
Women's litigation centers more on such issues as child custody,
programs, health care, prison discipline and control, and
visitation than men's, suggesting that establishing
parity is of itself an insufficient criterion for guiding prison
policies. Failure to recognize this both in policy and in
research only adds to the symbolic violence resulting from
distorted images of the relationship between gender and control.
SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND PRISON RESEARCH
Heffernan (this volume) describes how adminstrative processes of
classifying women prisoners constitute a form of symbolic
violence in which gender domination is perpetuated by official
discourse. This discourse reinforces stereotypes and imposes
behavioral expectations through corresponding policies based on
uncritical images of heterosexuality and gender roles. Just as the
rhetorical images connoted by official documents create a
culture-defining reality that reflects a form of symbolic
violence, so too do research discourses shape images in ways that
reproduce subtle forms of domination in how we examine prisons
and prisoners. By failing to recognize the subtle, yet powerful
ways that gender becomes a technology of control, our research
reaffirms and recreates an invisible source of oppression and
domination by misconceptualizing and ignoring the crucial
element of especially hetersexually-based gendered culture.
Symbolic violence refers to the power of symbols to impose,
devastate, attack, suppress, and distort ways of seeing,
thinking, talking, and acting. Symbolic violence often can be more
destructive than physical assault in that it imposes
and reinforces social harms caused by class, gender, and class
differences in what Collins (1990) calls the "matrix of
domination. It 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 therefore
requires some unrecognized complicity by those on whom the effect
is exercised. Our images and understandings of prison culture
derive from the productions of outsiders, and researchers are a
significant source in creating cultural understandings.
Smith (1987) observed that most people do not directly
participate in the making of their culture, and our ideas about
it may not arise directly from everyday lived relationships:
Rather, they are the product of the work of specialists
occupying influential positions in the ideological apparatus
(the educational system, communications, etc). Our culture
does not arise spontaneously; it is "manufactured" (Smith,
1987: 19).
Yet, most of us do not perceive this manufacturing process,
especially that of the prison research process itself, as an act
of violence. In subtle ways, uncritical conventional scholarship
imposes, distorts, and twists our cognition, and subsequently our
actions, forcefully and with often injurious consequences. Too
often, conventional prison scholars 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. The
result imposes the meanings of outsiders, including researchers
and the audience of the research, on the messages we hear from
our data.
Lefebvre (1971: 145) refers to the consequences of the conflict
between repression of alternatives and evasion of control as the
"terrorism of everyday life," by which he means the hidden and
abstract forms of subtle intimidation and domination on which
social existence is built. Bourdieu (1991) adds that
institutions of power lie behind behavior and cultural meanings
that construct and limit choices, confer legitimacy, and guide
our daily routine. This power is symbolic in that it relies on
shared beliefs and ways of expressing those beliefs. Symbolic
power is violent because it appropriates preferred meanings and
represses alternatives (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 4). The
contributors to this volume resist symbolic violence by
displaying alternative gendered meanings that
conceal the deeper levels of prison reality in ways that distort
understanding and thwart possibilities for change.
The power to exert symbolic violence exists in the power to
impose meanings as legitimate, thus concealing the underlying
power relations on which they are based (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 4).
In prisoner culture research of both men and women, images of deviance,
marginalization, and stigma can constitute a form of symbolic
violence. One way this occurs is through oppressive discourses
that reinforce and fail to challenge existing social relatiions,
including those of research. 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 intend
ourselves to be understood as well as how we understand our
topics. Discourses impose sets of formal or informal rules about
what can be said, how it can be said, and who shall say what to
whom (Schwalbe, et. al., 2000: 435).
As a cultural artifact, conventional discourses often impose
metaphors that wrench prisoners out of their shared humanity and
create conditions that exacerbate qualities such as animosity,
distrust, and predation. In research, the images from these
discourses 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. The conventional discourses of prison research impose
images that obscure and distort the deeper structures of the
culture and limit the possibility of seeing alternative meanings
and connections. Each of the contributors to this volume
provides an antidote to the symbolic violence of research by
critically examining how the gendered foundations of social life
are recreated in prison culture and serve as an ironic mechanism
in games of control and resistance. All follow the prescription
that critical social research should contribute to emancipation
by encouraging us to both emotionally and cognitively rethink
repressive emotional ideas and identities.
The question remains, however, as to why outsider researchers, even those
with a critical eye, should be credible in assessing and
reinterpreting the meanings of prison life as experienced by
insiders. This question, rarely addressed by prison scholars,
poses a challenge that becomes part of our methodological
problem, lest we, too, simply impose an alternative, but no less
destructive, discourse on those we study.
OUTSIDERS LOOKING IN
How can well-meaning, white, middle-class, educated, nearly middle-aged,
non-incarcerated academics "really know" the experiences of
generally economically disadvantaged, uneducated, incarcerated, usually
ethnically different and much younger, subjects?
This question especially challenges males writing
about the female prison experience, and raises credibility
issues when translating the standpoint of others into our own
narratives intended for a wider audience. In writing about the
experiences of female prisoners, we should reflect on the
insider/outsider question for several reasons. First, all
contributors here write as outsiders looking in. How can we
transform our subjects into what Smith (1987: 112) calls "my
puppets who speak, see, and think the words, sights and thoughts"
that we attribute to them? Second, the prison people with whom we
interact are demographically quite dissimilar to us. How do we
respond to the extreme essentialist view that only "identity
groups" can understand their own culture? Third, most of us teach or
work with racially, ethnically, and economically diverse groups
of students. What obstacles subvert our credibility when
attempting to speak about and to their culture and their
experiences from our own biographical and experiential
standpoint?
Sociological texts characteristically relate us to others and
even to ourselves as objects. Criminologists, perhaps more than
other social scientists, find themselves on the outside looking
in, making objects of our subjects in courts, criminals, gangs,
deviant groups, or prisons, among our topics.
In reflecting on whether scholars could really fully understand
the experiences of their research subjects, sociologist Georg
Simmel reputedly asked nearly a century ago: "Must one be Caesar
to know Caesar?" Max Weber (1965: 90) provided the answer: One
need not be Caesar to understand Caesar, he suggested, but it
helps.
Standpoint research, or the "privileged knowledge thesis," holds
that the views and claims of insiders are more credible than
those of outsiders. 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. 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, she realizes, provides an
image-creating metaphor
that distances the observer and observed in ways that silence both.
In conceptualizing this "family" of "indians" and in describing
their activity, Smith replaced others' identities and
interpretative frameworks with her own, thus making "the other"
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 through a process of "othering," in
which we impute identity and experiential meanings to others that
they might prefer not to have done by labeling them, attributing
motives, virtues, and defects, and, implicitly, by saying how we
are different from them (Schwalbe, et. al., 2000). Othering creates
imputed selves that stand in a relationship of superiority and
inferiority to each other, thus making researchers complicit in
preserving the asymmetrical power hierarchies they intend to
reduce.
Participatory researchers attempted to resolve the
insider/outsider problem by "celebrating the subject" and fully
integrating members of the culture being studied as full
participants in the research design, data collection, analysis,
and writing. Conventional scholars tend to ignore the issue,
although some (e.g., Van Maanen, 1988) have suggested
reflectively
critiqueing how the types of narratives we employ can
set us apart and often above our subjects. In penology, the
"celebration of the subject" emerged in part with conflict
theorists and symbolic interactionists who began to give voice to
the targets of social control to express their motivations and
view of the world. This provided one antidote to the dominant
voices of the controllers. More recently, the emergence of
"convict criminology" (Stephens, 2002) 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.
The belief that a culture is best-studied by insiders, or that
the claims and interpretations of insiders about their culture
should be given more credence than the
observations of outsiders, however, raises the problem of
relativism, in which all standpoints risk being judged equally
valid. Mannheim (1937) provides a way out of this potential
problem. For Mannheim, "standpoint" was not a form of
relativism, in which all perspectives are of equal value with no
transcedent rules to sift out meritorious claims from those less
so. He put forth what he called "relationism," or knowledge seen
in the full context of the historically and socially shaped
ideologies that shaped it:
Relationism signifies merely that all of the elements of
meaning in a given situation have reference to one another and
derive their significance from this reciprocal
interrelationship in a given frame of thought (Mannheim, 1937:
86).
Multiple audiences (or stakeholders) present the challenge of
multiple standpoints on both ends of the researcher/audience
continuum. The trick is to recognize the dialectical process
that privileges not the claims of one audience over another, and
to activate the process of dialog. Although not specifically
drawing from Mannheim, Smith, or others who address the
outsider/insider problem, the contributors here each follow their
spirit:
Locating the standpoint of women in the everyday world
outside the text (in which the text is written and read)
creates a whole new set of problems to be solved, problems
of the relationship between text and reader, problems of
how to write texts that wil not transcribe the subject's
actualities into the relations of ruling, texts that will
provide for their readers a way of seeing further into the
relations of organizing their lives (Smith, 1987: 47).
While it may help to "be Caeser" to present his standpoint,
individual lenses are no less subject to distortion than other
prisms, and a constant iterative dialog between insider and outside
cognition and interpretation, as the contributors here demonstrate,
provides an antidote both to relativism and to the dogma of
"privileged knowledge."
In this volume, we recognize the difference between "speaking
as," "speaking for," and "speaking about" women prisoners. In
the aggregate, we allow women to speak as themselves in order
that we may speak on their behalf. By integrating their views with
our own theoretical
insights, we allow our readers to examine the invisible
ways in which gender shapes the prison experience in a
dialectical game of resistance and control. Our intent is to
expand the dialog by which we understand how gender contributes
to the punitive context of prisons for all prisoners.
Existential Display: Chapter Summary
The works in this volume build on the conceptual ideas presented
here in varous ways. But, in the aggregate, they display the
absurdity of prison life, its existential dilemmas, and how gender
games are played out in prison.
BARBARA ZAITZOW provides a framework for examining gendered experiences
of women in prison by illustrating
how their struggle to accommodate prison life with problems of
their outside lives.
She argues that relationships (with
outside family members, inside friends/family, and staff), programs,
rules, the culture itself, combine to reinforce a definition of
"womanhood" that may not have relevance or practicality for women, either
in prison or on release.
Further, the deceptive nature of women's prisons, often seen as
"soft," "campus-like," or "easy time,"
masks repression that, while subtle, is stronger than in men's institutions.
Introducing a theme that other contributors build on, she
concludes that identical treatment of male and female prisons would not
be beneficial to women, and that
we cannot eradicate gender differences within prison while they
persist in the outside world.
Prisons, of course, have not emerged de novo, separate from the broader
culture. ESTHER HEFFERNAN illustrates how they are embedded in an
historical process reflecting gendered
ideologies of punishment. Drawing from
Bourdieu, she applies the concept of "symbolic violence" to illustrate
how the traditional classification of women prisoners
arose out of and reinforced gender domination by imposing
images of "proper feminitity" on female prisoners.
This symbolic imposition is violent because it ruptures women from
part of their humanity.
This forcibly deprives women of their social capital, and only by
challenging this outside the walls can we transform prisons as well.
Too often, we overlook jails when studying prisoners. Yet, women in jails,
who--like men--often serve up to several years--tend to be excluded from
studies of incarcerated women. KATHLEEN FERRARO and ANGELA MOE correct
this by illustrating how women are controlled through routinization
that subjectifies women and reinforces institutionalized power
asymmetries of race, class, and gender.
Yet, they remind us, women are not simply passive agents or totally
powerless victims. They possess means, albeit limited, to resist
the imposition of control and in ways that partially mediate domination.
In challenging the use of incarceration for most women offenders, they
argue that activivists on the outside, especially feminists, should
take a more active role in recognizing the relationship between
gender oppression and incarceration.
In coping with imprisonment, prisoners engage in a dialectical dance
in which their past experiences combine with the control and deprivations
of prison culture to add to the punishment. LORI GIRSHICK
details how an overwhelming proportion of women in prisons and
jails were physically, sexually, and emotionally abused prior to
entry. The sexualized environment of custodial institutions,
which includes physical constraint, surveillance, and instrusive
searches, retraumatizes women with a history of prior abuse.
Existing carceral policies fail to take this into consideration in
policies of control. As a consequence, the sexualized nature of
control in prison must be reconceptualized as a social problem in order
to prevent the revictimization of women when incarcerated.
The androcentrism of the criminal justice system and corresponding
research, SUSAN SHARP and ELAINE ERIKSEN argue, would leave the impression
that all prisoners are alike.
One significant difference between male and female prisoners is that
women, far more than men, tend to have dependent children on whom
incarceration has devastating consequences. Lacking social capital,
these women and children become society's "throw-aways."
As a consequence, we cannot fully understand women's prison experiences
without also understanding the the relationship between children and
mothers, and how maternal incerceration contributes to punishment.
The class and racial underpinnings, which affect both prison and
post-release adjustment, reinforce the need to re-assess the so-called
"impartiality" of the criminal justice system.
This requires, they contend, not only the need to develop creative programs
to address the needs of imprisoned mothers, but for researchers and
others to examine the broader implications of this gendered layer of
punishment and its impact of the families left behind.
Our social identity tells 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.
The message of an identity conveys strength, weakness,
honorability, accessibility, and other valuable attributes.
But, identities also can be constructed in ways that challenge or
reinforce assymetrical control. Using data from her study of
three women's studies in England, MARY BOSWORTH
illustrates how the intersection of gender, race and sexuality
shape prisoners' identity. She argues that these identities can be
shifted, manipulated, and transcended to challenge the power mechanisms
in prisons in an ironic game that uses the gendered and
racial forces of domination to
renegotiate and restructure their stigmatized status.
In developing their identity as women or as members of an ethnic
group, they shift from being passive recipients of power to agents
resisting it.
Most studies of prisoner culture focus either on male or on females.
Few do both.
RICHARD JONES and THOMAS SCHMID correct this by illustrating parallel
adaptation strategies of females and male prisoners in two
Midwest institutions.
They introduce the metaphor of
"cultural soujourner" to describe the border-crossings from the outside
world into prison terrain, a crossing that requires identity work.
Like Bosworth, they describe how control in women's prisons is partly a
dialectical identity struggle in which women can resist some of
the dominating forces that constrain them. Focusing on identity
assaults, in which prisoners' former identities are replaced with
new, more degrading ones, the analysis illustrates how building
on identities as mother and other non-institutional statuses help
women from seeing themselves as captives.
Reversing the traditional approach of applying concepts used to study
males on female prisoners, Jones and Schmid suggest ways
to use our understandings of women in prison to the male experience.
We cannot fully understand gendered power in women's prisons without
also understanding how conceptions and practices of masculinity
shape a hierarchical power structure. FAITH LUTZE moves us beyond
the prison arena by arguing that even women's prisons reflect an
ultramasculine environment based on traditional sex role stereotypes
and male models of domination.
Male power, she explains, defines individual
interaction (private and public), the law, and the formation of policy and
institutions. This inhibits especially women with histories of prior
abuse for whom
the institutionalization of ultramasculine sex role stereotypes
reaffirms their powerlessness.
The irony is that even "women-centered" approaches to programs intended
to empower women are likely to fail, because the current structure
of prisons magnifies the structural inequalities of society that women
will confront upon release.
Although the explicit
theoretical perspectives underlying individual pieces vary, the
central organizing theme that unites these pieces combines
critical gender theory with an exploration of the absurdity of
gendered experiences that extends beyond the walls. The strength
of this eclectic integration lies in pulling together
seemingly conventional empirical studies within a broader
framework that, following Pirandello, allows
gender domination to be displayed as part of our existential prison on
both sides of the walls.
.bibliography
.bib
.ce BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Howard. 1986. Doing Things Together.
Evanston (Ill.): Northwestern University Press.
Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. 1992. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the
Debate on Sexual Inequality.
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967.
The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.
Garden City (N.Y.): Doubleday-Anchor.
Berne, Eric. 1975.
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.
New York: Grove Press.
Bosworth, Mary. 1999. Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power
in Women's Prisons. London: Ashgate Press.
Clifford, James. 1988.
The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge (Mass.):
Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1979.
The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, Patrica Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Collins, Randall. 1979. The Credential Society: An Hitorical Sociology
of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press.
Esslin, Martin. 1961. The Theatre of the Absurd.
New York: Anchor Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1961.
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients
and other Inmates. New York: Anchor.
1969a. Strategic Interaction.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
__________.
1969b.
Expression Games: An Analysis of Doubts at Play."
Pp 1-81 in Strategic Interaction,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodenough, Ward H. 1981.
Culture, Language, and Society. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings.
Goodstein, Lynne, Doris Layton MacKenzie, and R. Lance Shotland.
1984.
"Personal Control and Inmate Adjustment to Prison."
Criminology, 22(August): 343-369.
Greer, Kimberly. 2002. "Walking an Emotional Tightrope: Managing
Emotions in a Woman's Prison." Symbolic Interaction, 25(1):117-139).
Hayner, Norman S. and Ellis Ash. 1940.
"The Prison as Community,"
American Sociological Review, 5(August): 577-583.
Heidensohn, Frances. 1986. "Models of Justice: Portia or Persephone? Some
Thoughts on Equality, Fairness, and Gender in the Field of Criminal
Justice." Internatinal Journal of the Sociology of Law. 14:287-98.
Ingraham, Chrys. 1994. "The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist
Sociology and Theories of Gender." Sociological Theory, 12(July):
203-219.
Jones, Richard A. and Tom Schmid. 2000. Doing Time: Prison Experience and
Identity among First-Time Inmates. Greenwich (Conn.): JAI Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New York:
Harper Torchbooks.
Lutze, Faith E. and David W. Murphy. 1999. "Ultramasculine
Prison Environments and Inmates' Adjustment: It's Time to Move
beyond the 'Boys will be Boys' Paradigm." Justice Quarterly,
16(December): 709-733.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World.
McCorkel, Jill A.
1998. "Going to the Crackhouse: Critical Space as a Form of
Resistance in Total Institutions and Everyday Life."
Symbolic Interaction, 21(3):227-252.
Miller, Jody. 2001. One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Milovanovic, Dragan, and Jim Thomas. 1989.
"Overcoming the Absurd: Prisoner Litigation as Primitive
Rebellion."
Social Problems, 36(February): 48-60.
Owen, Barbara A. 1998. In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a
Women's Prison. New York: SUNY Press.
_____. 1988. The Reproduction of Social Control: A Study of Prison
Workers at San Quentin. New York: Praeger.
Pirandello, Luigi. 1922. Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of
an Author - "Henry IV." - Right You Are! (If You Think So). New
York: E.P. Dutton & Company.
Sabo, Don, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London.
2001. Prison Masculinities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Smith, Dorothy E. The Everyday World as Problematic: A
Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Stephens, Richard. 2002. Convict Criminology. Belmont (Calif): Wadsworth.
Thomas, Jim. (forthcoming). "Communicating Prison Culture." (under review,
Altamira Press)
Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales from the Field.
University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Weber, Max. 1965. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
New York: The Free Press.
Wheeler, Patricia A., Rebecca Trammell, Jim thomas, and Jennifer Findlay.
1989. "Persephone Chained: Parity or Equality in Women's Prisons?"
The Prison Journal, 69(Spring-Summer): 88-102.
Return to JT's homepage