Living Behind Symbolic and Concrete Barriers of Total Institutions: Reflections on the Transition Between a Domestic Symbolic Patriarchal Imprisonment and a Co-Governed, State-Sponsored Incarceration in Perú

This article seeks to analyse the paradox of freedom and imprisonment, reflecting on the connections between and nuances of intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) and women’s imprisonment in the Global South, particularly in Perú. The story follows Maria, a woman serving a 14-year sentence for the homicide of her husband, an act she committed after experiencing 20 years of psychological and physical abuse. I have chosen to focus on her ambivalence towards her experience of IPVA, using Goffman’s (1961) concept of the ‘total institution’; I suggest that Maria was living under a patriarchal and symbolic total institution, a prison-like home (Avni 1991). Following this, while imprisoned for the homicide of her husband, Maria was physically incapacitated in a co-governed, patriarchal, nation-state prison. Nevertheless, simultaneously, in this custodial setting, she found a semi-autonomous path to reinforce her sense of agency and to construct interpersonal relationships that have enabled her to question the preceding patriarchal norms.

Criminalized Vietnamese women, ‘problem gambling’ and experiential rifts: Towards a criminology of diversity

When issues emerge in women’s imprisonment, criminology often responds with narratives of ‘difference’. In this article we respond to the call of Barbara Hudson, and generate a ‘criminology of diversity’ instead. We present the case of Vietnamese women in Victoria, Australia, whose incarceration is increasing at an alarming rate. According to government discourse, this increase occurs because Vietnamese women in Victoria have a distinct ‘problem gambling’ pathway to crime that is supported by Vietnamese lending arrangements. Seeking to disaggregate and denature this essentialist and reductionist narrative, we draw on the accounts of specialist Vietnamese community workers to explore the various meanings and significance of gambling in the lives of Vietnamese women in Victoria. We further engage with the work of Paul Gilroy on diasporic identities and Ghassan Hage on vacillations to illustrate what is gained by recognizing the overlaps, parallels and points of divergence that form within and between ‘different’ groups.

Decolonizing incarcerated women’s identities through the lens of prison abolitionism

Criminological discourses among people of African descent globally continue to suffer from a crisis of application of Western explanatory frameworks with gross implications on the development of African centered epistemologies and frameworks. One of the central arguments in this paper is that criminological discourses, specifically on class-specific, racialized-gendered identities of incarcerated women, are not free of the colonial matrices of power that underpin imperialism. What will emerge in this article is that incarcerated women’s identities should be reconstructed as women’s criminalization continues to be framed and presented in monolithic law and order ways. A focus on reconstruction is important to decolonize women’s imprisonment by imperialist white supremacist particularly focusing on how their pluralistic identities, which often collude and collide, shape their trajectories in unpredictable and criss-crossing ways to subject them to criminalization. An analysis of case studies presented in this paper will reveal how women’s experiences of womanhood are shaped by race, gender and class which produce different forms of subjectivities and embodied selves. Reimagining such identities from a lens of the coloniality of being therefore seeks to move away from single-strand criminological discourses which fail to capture the subtle social forms of oppression and resistance. The underlying question therefore is how can incarcerated women’s identities be reconstructed to challenge the hegemony of the western canon in criminology? The paper is organised into four sections. A case for re-imagining incarcerated women’s identities is made. The second theme, coloniality of being as a conceptual framework, is introduced as an overarching framework. Being one of the pillars of the decolonial epistemic perspective, the coloniality of being frames the black women’s lived experiences in institutional settings. The paper concludes by making a case for rethinking of dominant criminological discourses in order to shift the bio-graphy of knowledge in criminology in Africa. We recommend the abolition of the colonial and apartheid fetish of prisons for women and men in South Africa.