Mary Bosworth & Emma Kaufman On Placing Gender At The Centre of Criminological Analysis
‘Through our complex identities, we thus become both subjects and subjected to the hierarchies and history of power’
In Gender and Punishment, Mary Bosworth and Emma Kaufman attempt to retrieve gender from the margins and place it at the centre of criminological analysis. While calling the apathy of criminologists towards gender studies ‘strange’, Bosworth and Kaufman explain how gender theory might prove instrumental in explaining critical accounts of punishment. They say:
‘Our aim, in short, is to explore what happens when gender is placed at the centre rather than at the periphery of criminological analysis’.
At the outset, Bosworth and Kaufman trace the emergence of contemporary gender studies and how it diverged from the discipline of women studies. It then goes on to explain the connection of feminist works with the themes of class, race, and sexuality and highlights how the research on crime and punishment has overlooked the key concepts in feminist and queer theory. These observations are then placed into a larger discussion on why scholars explore the wider social contexts of punishment and how incorporating gender theory would impact their study of punishment.
While the work of feminist theorist Pat Carlen is appreciated as initiating a new discussion about the ways that prisons create and operate through gender roles, it is also highlighted that while most of the works on women imprisonment has drawn heavily from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, there is an absence of research on gender in men’s penal institutions — which is called regrettable and confounding:
‘Perhaps one of the reasons for the relative paucity of research into gender in
men’s prisons are that masculinity exists as a somewhat paradoxical resource for men behind bars. On the one hand, masculinity is heavily equated with power and control within the prison, particularly for those who acquire a dominant position in the social and institutional hierarchy. Yet, unless there is a total breakdown of order, a prisoner’s ability to reap the full benefits of masculinity is always held in check by the authority of the prison staff.’
The work of Ben Crewe on the sociology of English prisons is also cited to highlight that just like women prisoners, imprisoned men are also dependant on the institution for their needs, which has a potent effect on their relationship with both fellow inmates and prison staff.
Highlighting the dearth of study that looks at prisoners as real gendered people living in real-time, it is argued that this practice of ignoring gender amounts to disembodiment and disconnecting of prisoners from the gendered practices that shape penal expectations and daily life within the prison:
‘As a result, theoretical accounts of power within the prison tend to overlook how concepts like justice and legitimacy are refracted through ideas about gender. From a feminist perspective, this means that many accounts of punishment miss a significant point about the way power gets expressed.’
Bosworth and Kaufman further lay down the essentials of feminist theories of intersectionality, performativity and embodiment. While making a case for incorporating these theories in criminological research, it is argued that this incorporation would also help in analysing how ‘certain bodies come to be considered socially important — worth reforming, worth punishing, worth paroling, worth researching — shapes the sociology of punishment’
After exploring the contours of feminist and gender studies and how their incorporation can render research on prison sociology more meaningful, the attention shifts to probing the politics of studying punishment and society. The take of Lucia Zedner on ‘fatalism of deconstructionist method’ to study the sociology of punishment is placed to argue that while Zedner does provide an argument for having a normative approach towards studying sociology of punishment, the answer to what this normative criminological work might entail can be traced from the writing of queer theorist Eve Sedgwick — where academic paranoia towards deconstructionist method is critiqued for having a hegemonic approach towards inquiry, and while doing so, making a normative claim about how the inquiry should look like:
‘Extending this analysis to criminology, we might say that sociologists of punishment often adopt a ‘paranoid’ hermeneutic, engaging in a kind of deconstructionist detective work whose aim is to eke out the repressive workings of state power wherever they exist. The problem, just as Zedner pointed out, is that this hermeneutic quickly becomes a normative epistemology in which the right kind of knowledge is that which is found and exposed through paranoia, deconstruction, and the practice of ‘ever-vigilant watch.’
While highlighting the said concern with the current approach towards studying sociology of punishment, Bosworth and Kaufman argue that this has led to sheer neglect of other lines of thought and intellectual approaches towards the study of prisons, while also ignoring other sites and modes of punishment which are different from prisons. This is cited as a challenge to the development of both the research and the theory on the sociology of punishment. They argue:
‘scholars’ obeisance to only particular writings by Foucault, Durkheim and Marx has restricted the sociological imagination, leaving other ideas and theories in ever-smaller and marginalised sub-fields. Notwithstanding the considerable work of individual feminist scholars, gender theory remains an area of scholarship that is drawn on only rarely, and still almost exclusively in studies of women’s imprisonment’
After highlighting both the limitations and the consequences of the prevailing approach of criminological research towards a sociology of punishment, Bosworth and Kaufman go on to argue that gendering of empirical critique of punishment is necessary for bridging the gap between theory and lived experience. This necessity, they argue, is not just a methodological choice, but also an ethical oversight:
‘…such ‘grand’ theories gloss over the real people whose lives they describe. Thus we find that theoretical writing in this field often refers to the general category of ‘punishment’ rather than to specific criminal justice practices. This tendency not only discounts the nuances between different practices of punishment; it also suppresses the experiences of the people subject to such practices. In doing so, ‘grand’ theory can, however unintentionally, efface its own subjects, rendering them disempowered objects of analysis. In so doing, theorizing without reference to the lived experience of punishment is not only a methodological choice; it also becomes an ethical oversight.’
By focusing on the lived experience of the prisoners, theorists would provide a more persuasive critique of penalty which can instigate wider social transformation through social change. They say:
‘The world is not as it should be, and it is our duty as researchers not only to understand it, but to try to change it’
Complement this with Alison Liebling on Prisons and Their Moral Performance, and Lucia Zedner on The Dangers of Dystopia.
