(En)gendering Habitus: Women, Prison, Resistance

Abstract

This paper posits that both formal theatre and everyday performances in prison provide a means of foregrounding the slippage between articulations of equality and practices that remain fixed in discursive binaries of good/bad; chaste/whore; compliant/deviant. Two plays by Rebecca Lenkiewicz – Her Naked Skin and That Almost Unnameable Lust – are considered in order to explore what I call an engendered ‘habitus’. In this article, I examine the ways contemporary performances about women in prison have foregrounded gendered behaviours in relation to the institution. Prison is considered as a setting for the durational performances of incarcerated bodies, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is deployed to consider everyday dispositions within the specific field. Theatre provides an aesthetic frame through which to consider prisons and Caoimhe McAvinchey’s notion of the performativity of punishment. Bourdieu’s interconnected concepts of habitus and field frame the investigation into the work of a single playwright, Rebecca Lenkiewicz.