Gender, Madness, and the Legacies of the Prisons Information Group (GIP)

Abstract

In the early 1970s, following the incarceration of a number of political prisoners, French philosopher Michel Foucault and others formed the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) to investigate and make known the intolerable French prison system. For all of their statements about giving prisoners the floor, Foucault and his associates – who were part of a broader social and cultural shift in the late 1960s and early 1970s – enacted and perpetuated masculinist and ableist ideas about protest and who constituted the “agentic thinking” (Grech, Disability and Poverty in the Global South: Renegotiating Development in Guatemala. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2015) subject. Available evidence indicates that the GIP was primarily concerned with organizing the most able, most politicized actors, despite their repeated nods toward a more inclusive protest. As Perry Zurn has argued, one of the “failures” of the GIP was the replication of its “academic whiteness and maleness within nonacademic, nonwhite, and nonmale elements of [its] legacy” (Zurn, Carceral Notebooks 12: 37–46, 2016). Though radical in many ways, the limitations apparent in the work of the GIP can still be seen in organizing and scholarship in the twenty first century.