Gender and Punishment
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Description
Gender is strangely missing from studies of punishment and society. Outside the work of a few scholars, all of whom are women writing about women, gender is usually ignored or relegated to the footnotes of this field of scholarship. To be sure there are some exceptions—Ben Crewe’s (2009) recent account of prison life in HMP Wellingborough contains a number of references to masculinity, as does Eamonn Carrabine’s (2006) genealogy of the Strangeways’ prison riot. Fifteen years ago, Joe Sim (1995) warned of the dangers of the ‘hypermasculinity’ that, he said, was endemic in prisons. In general, however, those authors most associated with the study of punishment and society—David Garland, Jonathan Simon, Dario Melossi, Loïc Wacquant—have apparently seen little explanatory or analytic value in gender. This article sets out to explain why gender matters and how gender theory, in particular, might inform critical accounts of punishment. To do this, we begin by mapping the themes of contemporary gender studies, a diverse and evolving field. We first examine the emergence of women’s studies, its divergence from gender studies and queer theory, and the connections between feminist work and questions about race, class and sexuality. We then trace the presence and absences of those ideas in contemporary studies of punishment and society. This brief genealogy reveals notable gaps in criminological writing on gender and punishment, particularly around key concepts in feminist and queer theory. We explore those overlooked concepts in the context of wider debates about criminological methodology, asking how the study of punishment would shift if gender were a more prominent site of enquiry. This concluding turn to methodology aims to bring questions about gender into the compelling debate about how and why scholars examine the wider social context of punishment practices. This enquiry has been described as ‘the sociology of punishment’, the study of ‘penality’ and in this volume, as a key part of the field known as ‘punishment and society’. Our task is to situate gender within that sociological line of thought. Our aim, in short, is to explore what happens when gender is placed at the centre rather than at the periphery of criminological analysis.
Source Publication
The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society
Source Editors/Authors
Jonathan Simon, Richard Sparks
Publication Date
2013
Recommended Citation
Kaufman, Emma and Bosworth, Mary, "Gender and Punishment" (2013). Faculty Chapters. 963.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/963
