Women's experiences of incarceration in Hong Kong: Doing time, doing choice, doing class-gender-culture

Abstract

This article engages with socialist and postmodern feminist debates to theorise how classed, gendered and cultured inequities structured the criminalisation and incarceration of 24 Chinese offending women in the Hong Kong penal-welfare complex. In this process the women were active agents who made reflexive choices in response to the substantial challenges posed by economic marginalisation, gendered-cultured discrimination and corrective attempts at disciplinary normalisation. However, as the women exercised agency by drawing on their real experiences of inequality and the hegemonic discursive representations of the ‘work ethic,’ ‘normative femininity’ and ‘filial piety’ which legitimated them, they mobilised ‘strategic’ elements which articulated the interests of powerful social, economic and political forces and thereby sustained their disadvantaged position at the margins. The women's choices, therefore, were discursively constituted at the ‘intersectionality’ of unequal classed-gendered-cultured relations and reflected ‘negotiated actions’ framed by broader socio-economic and cultural power structures.