Carceral Feminism Research Articles

‘Compassionate’ Control: Social Work and the Rise of Carceral Feminism in Progressive Era Police Reform

The contemporary Defund the Police movement has renewed interest in social work’s role in public safety, leading some to call for increased police–social work collaborations. However, claims regarding the potential virtues and pitfalls of social work–police collaborations are largely ahistorical. To contextualize current debates, a systematic investigation into the evolution of social work and its relationship with law enforcement is necessary, particularly the impact that gender norms have had on this relationship. Drawing from the National Conference on Charities and Corrections proceedings, we examined how gendered underpinnings have shaped social work’s relationship to law enforcement and the understanding of social work’s role in public safety. During the Progressive Era, social workers acted as an intervention to reform police by infusing ‘rehabilitative’, ‘protective’, ‘preventative’, and ‘quarantining’ approaches in law enforcement. What emerges from the archives is a chronicle detailing how using social work as a gendered intervention for police reform during the Progressive Era fell short of addressing the root causes of carceral issues, drawing parallels between the Progressive Era reforms and today’s contemporary reforms.

‘We can no longer fill prisons with men and cemeteries with women’: exploring carceral and abolitionist feminist discourses on gendered violence in Albania and Kosovo through photo elicitation

Abstract Over two decades, extensive research and heated debate have addressed tensions between carceral and abolitionist responses to gendered violence within feminism. Disagreements arise from the existing multiplicity of feminist approaches and divergent socio-economic and political contexts in which such violence occurs. At the same time, different conceptions of the state and community also impact on feminist organizing around these issues in particular contexts. This article analyses the tensions between so-called carceral feminism and abolitionist feminism in the context of Albania and Kosovo, two countries not only heavily impacted by domestic and sexualized violence and feminicide but also with a significantly rising feminist mobilization. Using the photo-elicitation method, we interviewed feminist activists and academics regarding the ways they interpret gendered violence, the strategies and interventions they deem most relevant in addressing it, and the contradictions and tensions that exist in their discourses and practices. Our aim is to offer a contextualized critique of carceral feminism, while illustrating the reasons and lack of alternatives that have impeded a transformative imagination towards abolitionist feminism.

Whose Streets? Our Streets! . . . or Maybe Not? Legitimizing Racialized Gendered Policing in Modern Cities

“Whose streets? Our streets!” This special forum centered on The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification conjures this popular urban protest chant that may (or may not) be familiar to many readers. While the response—“our streets!”—is forceful, it is far from a clear-cut truism or uncomplicated declaration. Herein, Fischer and five interlocutors discuss the historical and spatial complexities regarding who has a right to define, navigate, and regulate urban spaces. They take up the questions—to whom do the streets belong—by considering regimes of police power at the nexus of sex, moral reform, and so-called “troublesome” terrains in three twentieth-century U.S. cities. They also engage how, as Fischer states, law-enforcement practices of sexual policing decriminalized white womanhood while criminalizing Black womanhood, and thereby expanded police authority, racialized gendered state violence, carceral feminism, gentrification, and spatialized racial and economic inequalities.

Gender-Based Violence and Carceral Feminism in Australia: Towards Decarceral Approaches

This article explores the limitations of criminal legal responses to gender-based violence in Australia, specifically sexual assault law reforms and the criminalisation of coercive control. We demonstrate that carceral horizons deployed to address gender-based violence cause further harm to survivors and overshadow diverse perceptions and practices of justice. We suggest that such an approach is inappropriate and dangerous in the Australian context, given the historical and enduring harms of colonisation and the extent to which the actors within and the structure of the criminal legal system perpetrate violence towards Indigenous survivors of gender-based violence. Drawing on insights from research on survivors’ justice needs, survivors’ experiences in the criminal legal system, and abolitionist, transformative, and Indigenous scholarship, we discuss the potential for alternative ways of conceptualising justice responses in the Australian context that move beyond and avoid further perpetuating the harms arising from criminal legal responses to gender-based violence.

Protection for Whom? Police Legitimacy and the Historical Origins of Carceral Feminism

In a reflection on Anne Gray Fischer’s The Streets Belong to Us, this article considers how her scholarship on sexual policing in 20th century America situates sexual policing and the state’s criminalization of women as central rather than supplemental to our broader understanding of policing. Fischer’s analysis demonstrates how police used sexual policing to bolster their authority amid threats to their legitimacy and to defend and protect a racially segregated patriarchal social order. Her research also uncovers the centrality of anti-Black and gendered policing to gentrification and urban economic revival. Finally, Fischer historicizes white dominance feminists’ partnership with law enforcement by demonstrating law enforcement’s historical (and racialized) decriminalization of white women’s public sexual lives. Fischer’s pathbreaking analysis suggests the need for historians of policing and the carceral state to view gender and sexuality as foundational to the construction of modern policing and the broader development of the racialized carceral state.

When a “Feminist” Government Tackles Gender-Based Violence: A WPR Approach to the Speeches of Canadian Cabinet Ministers (2015–2019)

Abstract Ending gender-based violence was a central promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's self-declared feminist government. Executive speeches about gender-based violence provide clues about what types of feminist ideas undergird the 42nd Parliament. Was carceral feminism advanced, by focusing on punishment? Or neoliberalized feminist ideas, by focusing on the market? Or social justice feminist ideas, by focusing on systemic change? Applying the concept of governance feminism and using Bacchi's WPR approach, this article investigates how gender-based violence is problematized in English- and French-language House of Commons debates in the 42nd Parliament by the cabinet. The speeches problematize gender-based violence as preventable and caused by systemic issues, but this transformational discourse is undermined by a focus on strengthening carceral responses and limiting human potential to economic productivity. Feminist ideas about gender-based violence were adopted, relying on carceral and neoliberalized feminist ideas. The Trudeau Liberals’ campaign for change was discursively undermined.

The rise of carceral feminism in Sweden: Analysing political debate and policy on men's violence against women

Drawing on recent parliamentary debates and policy proposals, this article illustrates how penal policies and punitive agendas to combat gendered violence are on the rise in Sweden. While right-wing parties have long deployed a rhetoric of crime and punishment, today the Social Democrats and Left Party (labelling themselves feminist), as well as parts of the women's shelter movement, are deploying a similar discourse. This article shows how men's violence against women suddenly became a highly prioritised political issue within a discursive framework of ‘crime and punishment’, thereby asking whether carceral feminism is emerging in Sweden. Firstly, we analyse the logic of this approach, after which we discuss associated risks, such as how carceral feminism (re)shapes the understanding of gendered violence, that it is neither effective nor demanded by victims and has stratifying and stigmatising effects on racialised communities. Furthermore, it silences material welfare solutions and ultimately legitimates the expansion of penal policies, thereby providing a foundation for a carceral state in which repression becomes the standard response to social problems.

Carceral Feminism on Repeat

Film Quarterly contributing editor Laurie Ouellette examines the inconsistencies at the core of Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit status as a feminist phenomenon. Since its debut in 1999, the program has been praised for promoting understandings of rape and domestic violence as introduced by the women’s movement, earning a reputation as a key popular culture home for feminist opinions. In this column, Ouellette examines the elephant in the room—SVU’s staunch support of the criminal justice system—in light of the cultural reckoning prompted by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. She concludes that SVU’s incorporation of feminist sensibilities, including solidarity with victims, covers up the persistent violence of policing but may also explain why female audiences horrified by this reality have not quit SVU.

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political Science

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political Science

An Epidemic of Virtue: A Review of Social Work's Complicity in “Prostitution” Interventions

This article engages with the field of social work's role in humanitarian and criminal legal responses to sex work in the United States over the last century. Our historical review reveals that, through interdisciplinary collaboration in the criminalization and rehabilitation of sex workers, social workers have contributed to the transformation of “prostitution” from an issue of sex workers’ rights to a psychological, criminal legal, and medical phenomenon. This has exacerbated the harm and stigma experienced by sex workers. In exploring social work interventions on sex work from the Progressive Era through the rise of neoliberalism, this article places its modern iteration, prostitution diversion programming, within the context of social work's carceral history with sex workers. We choose these periods not for their chronicity, but rather for the salient themes in these historical interventions that characterize modern diversion programming: power and control, punitive service provision, patriarchal rescue, and carceral feminism. To align with social work's mandate for social justice and client self-determination, this article offers policy and practice implications grounded in the decriminalization of sex work and divestment from the police and courts. Alternative service approaches spearheaded by sex workers are explored and placed within the context of labor, racial, gender, and immigration justice.

Introduction

The recent intensification of gendered surveillance in the United States underscores how surveillance technologies continue to abet criminalization domestically while enabling the US to renew orientalist narratives of rescue with respect to its military interventions abroad. Building on the 2015 Feminist Surveillance Studies volume edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet, this issue seeks to make a number of new interventions in the study of surveillance and gender. First, it calls for the incorporation of scholarship that approaches the US-led war on terrorism through the lens of gender and sexuality to develop a more refined understanding of how surveillance practices and contemporary imperial imaginaries overlap and inform one another. Second, it reconsiders the frame of carceral feminism by unpacking some of the assumptions around “carcerality” and “feminism.” Finally, it builds on the premise that existing black feminist scholarship has for some time theorized surveillance’s relation to gendered oppression. To do so, it considers how critical framings of hypervisibility and invisibility help us make sense of the racialized, gendered forms of surveillance deployed across the decades: from the mid-twentieth-century national security state to the contemporary neoliberal postfeminist regimes of the twenty-first century.

"A Little Right of Center": Carceral Feminism and the Expansion of Biosurveillance

In the United States, feminists within mainstream rape crisis advocacy have been working to address rape by advocating to end the DNA backlog and therefore, the expansion of DNA databases, locally and nationally. Despite criticisms from radical abolition feminists for practicing carceral feminism that incarcerates more Black and Brown people, rape crisis advocates have been continuing their entanglements with criminal justice, fully recognizing the contradictory ends of such investments. In this paper, I explore their continued carceral investments, through underlying logics and justifications based in science and law and the impacts of doing so, as it relates to the problem of racialized policing. Relying on Black feminist epistemologies and interdisciplinary methodologies, my analysis draws upon archived documents, reports, legislations, and ethnographically driven interviews and observations with and amongst state and non-state actors, who are stakeholders in DNA biosurveillance. I argue that carceral feminists continue their carceral investments through two justifications—materiality and recidivism—that results in intensification of policing in communities of color by expanding genome based racialized biosurveillance. The implications of their justifications further harm survivors of violence, and produce a multifaceted recidivism, that is unbounded spacio-temporally, deepening and furthering state reach within communities of color in perpetuity.

The State in Feminist Theory: Hopes and a Critique of Governance Feminism

Contemporary feminist theory rarely engages with the discussion of political strategies and the issue of the state. Feminist philosophers tend to interpret the state as an omnipotent institution continuously governing women’s lives and bodies, while defining women as rather passive objects of state politics. The new global wave of feminist protests against domestic violence and sexual harassment that has erupted in the last four years inspired a new cycle of theoretical debates about the meaning of gender equality and the role of the state in the feminist liberation project. The increasing power of feminist movements coupled with new feminist attempts to infuence political institutions raise new questions about the dominant feminist political strategies and engagements with the state. How should feminist movements view the state? What does the state mean, and what role do women play in it? The article discusses the state as a major feminist theoretical issue. It argues that feminist thinkers and activists need to engage with state issues if we are to achieve such large scale and structural changes as gender equality, the end of female poverty, or abolition of unpaid reproductive labor. The paper reconstructs the political theory of carceral feminism, i.e., the dominant form of political feminism in today’s world, developed by Catherine A. Mackinnon’s reviewing its recent critique formulated by Janet Halley. It concludes by posing the question about other alternative and non-carceral forms of feminist governance.

“The First Thing We Cry About is Violence”: The National Black Women’s Health Project and the Fight Against Rape and Battering

During the 1980s and 1990s, the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP) conceptualized gender violence within the Black community primarily as an issue of Black women’s health. Like other gender and racial health disparities, rape and battering derived from systemic oppression and could be treated through politically engaged “self-help” counseling. This stood in contrast to the narrow framing of gender violence as a crime issue in mainstream American politics and feminist anti-violence groups. The NBWHP’s unique interpretation compelled them to oppose the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, now understood as a touchstone of carceral feminism. Attending to their overlooked activism prompts a rethinking of the intertwining of the anti-violence-against-women movement and the US carceral state in the late twentieth century. It also shows that anti-violence organizing rooted in Black feminist politics survived the conservative turn of the 1980s.

Decriminalizing Domestic Violence and Fighting Prostitution Abolition: Lessons Learned From Canada’s Anti-Carceral Feminist Struggles

This article offers a cautionary tale for efforts to decriminalize domestic violence through a retrospective analysis of Canadian feminist legal activism to decriminalize sex work. Both domestic violence and sex work are contested terrains of activism, litigation, and scholarship and have come up against the disparate views of criminalization as necessary to protect women from violence, versus criminalization as compounding women’s potential risks for violence. Through the example of Canadian feminist jurisprudence in R v Bedford, wherein the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the endangerment of women as resulting from the criminalization of sex work, I explore the liminal space following this decision, and how regressive legislation was introduced to re-entrench carceralism in the breach of a seeming feminist victory. My focus is on how carceral feminism continues to occupy the liminal space as a force of colonial violence, further endangering Indigenous women. I draw linkages between several violent murders of street-involved Indigenous women and the severing of allyship among feminists, sex workers, and Indigenous women over the potential decriminalization of sex work. Finally, I suggest that opposition to the decriminalization of sex work is successfully argued by an emerging force of carceral feminism: neo-abolitionist feminists who have appropriated a politics of abolition and, yet, may have deepened carceralism in the lives of Indigenous women.

Law, Culture and Decolonisation: The Perspectives of Aboriginal Elders on Family Violence in Australia

Family violence within Aboriginal communities continues to attract considerable scholarly, governmental and public attention in Australia. While rates of victimization are significantly higher than non-Aboriginal rates, Aboriginal women remain suspicious of the ‘carceral feminism’ remedy, arguing that family violence is a legacy of colonialism, systemic racism, and the intergenerational impacts of trauma, requiring its own distinctive suite of responses, ‘uncoupled’ from the dominant feminist narrative of gender inequality, coercive control and patriarchy. We conclude that achieving meaningful reductions in family violence hinges on a decolonising process that shifts power from settler to Aboriginal structures. Aboriginal peoples are increasingly advocating for strengths-based and community-led solutions that are culturally safe, involve Aboriginal justice models, and recognises the salience of Aboriginal Law and Culture. This paper is based on qualitative research in six locations in northern Australia where traditional patterns of Aboriginal Law and Culture are robust. Employing a decolonising methodology, we explore the views of Elders in these communities regarding the existing role of Law and Culture, their criticisms of settler law, and their ambitions for a greater degree of partnership between mainstream and Aboriginal law. The paper advances a number of ideas, based on these discussions, that might facilitate a paradigm shift in theory and practice regarding intervention in family violence.

Contending with Carcerality: Discursive Resistance to Elite Appropriation of Antiviolence Activism in Indian Media.

Research has revealed how antiviolence activism can become entangled with the state's punitive agenda, leading to what some have called "carceral feminism." However, this scholarship focuses primarily on the U.S. context. Additionally, few studies examine the cultural battles about gender-based violence that emerge in television media, a site of cultural struggle and meaning making. This study conducts a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 46 Indian television panel broadcasts following a highly publicized rape in New Delhi in 2012. I find that elite state actors pursue punitive agendas, but feminists and other panelists engage in discursive resistance to this approach.

Beyond the Carceral #MeToo

In this article, we attempt a radical critique of the #MeToo movement. We do not aim to display #MeToo phenomenon as a molarity anchored to the nobility of its supposed historical origin. Rather we showcase it as a nomadological flow. This is a flow that, on the one hand, resonates with and folds the productive intensities of its supposed historical origin. But, on the other hand, it turns into a dangerous mad line of flight with a potential to stultify the relational dynamics of genders. Secondly, we will argue that what lies behind the metamorphosis of ‘Me Too’ activism into a dangerous line of flight, inclined to devilishly restructure the socius, is its precarious connection with the elusive media images. Thirdly we shall show how as a dangerous line of flight #MeToo activism ends up becoming an ally of neo-liberal carceral feminism and governmental schemes of incarceration and surveillance. And finally, we will focus on explaining the positionality of #MeToo in the light of schizo-aesthetics of body and desire.

Of sex and war: carceral feminism and its anti-carceral critique

Abstract In the last three decades, wartime sexual violence has become one of the main concerns for feminists engaged with international law. This essay reviews Karen Engle’s monograph on the causes and implications of today’s common-sense narrative about sexual violence in conflict. It shows how Engle’s powerful critique of ‘carceral feminism’ may represent a starting point for a new discussion of sex and war in international law.

Beyond Carceral Expansion: Survivors’ Experiences of Using Specialised Courts for Violence Against Women in Ecuador

This article presents empirical findings addressing the gap between specialised criminal laws on violence against women (VAW) in Ecuador and women’s actual needs and expectations when approaching the country’s specialised penal courts. Given its comprehensive legal system, Ecuador scores highly in protecting women from violence in international rankings. However, based on quantitative data, qualitative case file analysis, and in-depth interviews with survivors, judges, case-workers and judicial employees, this study reveals that, in Ecuador, most lawsuits are dropped without ever reaching a resolution. Because most survivors pursue protection from ongoing violence rather than a conviction, and because advancing a lawsuit can be a source of various forms of stress and fear, survivors usually withdraw from the trial once they are granted a protection order. Nevertheless, this order is lost when complainants fail to appear in court. In addition, police intervention is inadequate and seldom contributes to the effective protection of women. The paper thus augments debates on ‘carceral feminism’, showing that VAW laws are not necessarily bolstering the carceral apparatus on the ground. However, law does mask the state’s disregard toward women’s lived experiences and their lack of access to services that could ensure their protection and safety.