Changing Bodies, Ambivalent Subjectivities, and Women’s Punishment

Abstract

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.