Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society has just published a special issue titled “Women, Gender, and Prison: National and Global Perspectives,” available online through JSTOR.
The issue highlights pressing concerns that face women and gender-variant people who are imprisoned or targeted for heightened surveillance or harassment, globally and in the United States. Topics include mothering in prison, the racist history of the US prison system, campaigns to eliminate prison rape, the treatment of trans prisoners, the criminalization of poverty, and the targeting of migrant women.
Check out the table of contents:
Women in Prison: Victims or Resisters? Representations of Agency in Women’s Prisons in Greece (Andriani Fili)
A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy (Guy Geltner)
“Like I Was a Man”: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia (Sarah Haley)
Gendered Carceral Regimes in Sri Lanka: Colonial Laws, Postcolonial Practices, and the Social Control of Sex Workers (Jody Miller and Kristin Carbone-Lopez)
Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison (Lynne Haney)
Emotions behind Bars: The Regulation of Mothering in Argentine Jails (Constanza Tabbush and María Florencia Gentile)
Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes (Sarah Pemberton)
Gendering Transnational Criminality: The Case of Women’s Imprisonment in Peru (Camille Boutron and Chloé Constant)
Sexual Necropolitics and Prison Rape Elimination (Jessi Lee Jackson)
“Staff Here Let You Get Down”: The Cultivation and Co-optation of Violence in a California Juvenile Detention Center (Jerry Flores)
Women and the Criminalization of Poverty: Perspectives from Sierra Leone (Sabrina Mahtani)
Institutional Disparities: Considerations of Gender in the Commutation Process for Incarcerated Women (Carol Jacobsen and Lora Bex Lempert)
Signs is generously providing The Prison Studies Group with a copy of this issue, so swing by the office sometime if you want to take a look at the entire issue.