![\"Cover](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/signs.jpg\")
<\/a>Cover of Signs 39, no. 1 featuring a detail from Toni Bowers and Natasha Ward\u2019s untitled mural<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n by\u00a0amazzaschi<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The past forty years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of women imprisoned worldwide; over half a million women are now incarcerated, and the growth rate of women\u2019s imprisonment has outstripped that of men\u2019s. Despite neoliberal commitments to cut back the state, many states have dramatically increased spending on policing and imprisonment at the same time that the privatization of prisons and the diffusion of carceral power have escalated. This special issue of\u00a0Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society<\/em>,\u00a0available on JSTOR<\/span><\/a>, addresses these troubling and complex trends, bringing incisive feminist and intersectional critical analysis to bear on the experiences of imprisoned women in diverse geographical and historical contexts, the raced-gendered logics through which carcerality operates, and the role of incarceration and policing in producing gendered, raced, and classed national subjects. The issue features cover art by\u00a0Toni Bowers and Natasha Ward<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Andriani Fili, in \u201cWomen in Prison: Victims or Resisters? Reflections on Representation from Greece<\/span><\/a>,\u201d provides an overview of the criminological literature on women prisoners, which operates primarily within a resistance\/domination binary. Fili uses the example of the recent rebellions by women prisoners in Eleonas Thiva Prison for Women to complicate these assessments and to call for a thoroughly interactional conception of agency. G. Geltner\u2019s \u201cA Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy<\/span><\/a>\u201d further complicates the picture of women\u2019s incarceration: though women were underrepresented in medieval prison populations, women\u2019s wards were incorporated into prisons nearly from their advent, challenging the view of prisons as a historically male domain. Excavating the gendered logic of racialization that underwrites US prison systems,\u00a0Sarah Haley examines Georgia\u2019s 1908 prison reform law<\/span><\/a>, which forbade \u201cwomen\u201d from serving on chain gangs. In practice, however, black women were regularly subjected to both chain gang labor and domestic labor in white households, thus demonstrating that \u201cblack women\u2019s humanity was illegible,\u201d an understanding that stood in continuity with black women\u2019s positioning during slavery and worked in concert with the economic regime of the Jim Crow South.<\/span><\/p>\n Several articles explore the multifaceted ways in which gendered control within the prison works to shore up national ideals and systems of race and class. Detailing how Sri Lanka\u2019s Methsevana State House of Detention serves as a \u201csite of gendered social control,\u201d\u00a0Jody Miller and Kristin Carbone-Lopez<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u201ctrace how vestiges of British colonial law intersect with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, militarization, and the gendered liberalization of Sri Lanka\u2019s economy to heighten national anxieties about women\u2019s sexuality and sexual practices, culminating in penal excesses directed at those engaged in commercial sex.\u201d Lynne Haney continues this examination of prison as a site of gendered regulation in her \u201cMotherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Here, Haney uses the case of an alternative punishment system, California\u2019s prisons for female offenders and their children, to sound a cautionary note regarding the proliferation of gender-sensitive, decentralized institutions. Haney finds that \u201cwhat began as a promising alternative to punishment morphed into its own form of power and control.\u201d\u00a0Constanza Tabbush and Mar\u00eda Florencia Gentile<\/span><\/a>, too, examine the regulation of mothering in prison. Tracing the affective economies of mothering in Argentine prisons, they note two regulative regimes in operation: Until their children reach age four, women who parent in prison are treated as \u201cbiological reproducers of the nation.\u201d After age four, children are no longer allowed in prison, and mothers become \u201cmoral threats to their own children\u201d and, particularly for migrant mothers, threats to the Argentine nation.<\/span><\/p>\n Sarah Pemberton\u2019s article, \u201cEnforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes<\/span><\/a>,\u201d compares the legal treatment of transgender prisoners in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on Michel Foucault\u2019s work on sovereignty, governmentality, and discipline, Pemberton demonstrates that these systems of power interact not only to reinforce a binary conception of sex and gender but also to produce violent forms of masculinity and to subject transgender prisoners to heightened risks of violence. In \u201cGendering Transnational Criminality: The Case of Women\u2019s Imprisonment in Peru\u201d\u00a0Camille Boutron and Chlo\u00e9 Constant<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>show that women\u2019s prisons in Peru \u201cbear \u2026 the traces of colonial practices of racialization, republican conceptions of race- and class-specific feminine virtues, and the political repression of social movement activism in the 1980s and 1990s.\u201d The feminization of poverty within contemporary neoliberalism has meant that women have turned to delinquency for survival, and women who \u201ctransgress traditional social roles\u201d become targets of reform through the penal system.<\/span><\/p>\n Through an in-depth critical reading of the US National Prison Rape Elimination Commission\u2019s June 2009 report,\u00a0Jessi Lee Jackson argues<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that prisons are a site of both bio- and necropolitical sexual regulation. Because the prison regime is itself infused with sexual control and coercion, Jackson argues, proposals that aim to prevent rape through heightened state surveillance and control will only serve to heighten the sexual violence that prisoners face.\u00a0Jerry Flores continues the examination of the state production of violence<\/span><\/a>\u00a0through his analysis of a California juvenile detention center for girls. Rather than accepting the discourse of the \u201cnew violent girl,\u201d Flores documents how correctional staff \u201cencourage, condone, and co-opt violence\u201d for their own ends in order to reduce their own workload or maintain order and hierarchies within the institution.<\/span><\/p>\n Sabrina Mahtani\u2019s \u201cWomen and the Criminalization of Poverty: Perspectives from Sierra Leone<\/span><\/a>\u201d examines how the severe poverty experienced by many women in Sierra Leone leads to their coming \u201cin conflict with the law.\u201d Women who are unable to repay loans taken out to make ends meet, including from microlending agencies, are often imprisoned under 1916 Larceny Act, a law enacted during British colonial times. Mahtani marshals a host of evidence to argue that \u201cinternational and domestic gender reform efforts need to incorporate and support this neglected population as part of wider gender justice efforts.\u201d Finally,\u00a0Carol Jacobsen and Lora Bex Lempert examine the disparities in commutation of life sentences in Michigan<\/span><\/a>. Noting that clemency \u201chas become [a] hostage in [the] war on crime,\u201d Jacobsen and Lempert analyze the power dynamics of the public commutation hearings for eleven women, finding that the hearings function as yet another means of gendered social control within the penal system. These hearings, they argue, are as \u201cfictions of equity,\u201d and the state\u2019s flattened understanding of criminality forecloses any possibility of understanding these women and their crimes as embedded within a gendered social context.<\/span><\/p>\n To access the issue on JSTOR,\u00a0click here<\/span><\/a>. The full table of contents is as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n Women in Prison: Victims or Resisters? Reflections on Representation from Greece<\/span><\/a><\/span> A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy<\/span><\/a><\/span> \u201cLike I Was a Man\u201d: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia<\/span><\/a><\/span> Gendered Carceral Regimes in Sri Lanka:<\/span><\/a><\/span> Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison<\/span><\/a><\/span> Emotions behind Bars: The Regulation of Mothering in Argentine Jails<\/span><\/a><\/span> Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes<\/span><\/a><\/span> Gendering Transnational Criminality: The Case of Women\u2019s Imprisonment in Peru<\/span><\/a><\/span> Sexual Necropolitics and Prison Rape Elimination<\/span><\/a><\/span> \u201cStaff Here Let You Get Down\u201d:<\/span><\/a><\/span> Women and the Criminalization of Poverty: Perspectives from Sierra Leone<\/span><\/a><\/span> Institutional Disparities:<\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\nWomen, Gender, and Prison: <\/span><\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
National and Global Perspectives <\/span><\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
(Autumn 2013; vol. 39, no.1)<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\nAndriani Fili<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nG. Geltner<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nSarah Haley<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nColonial Laws, Postcolonial Practices, and the Social Control of Sex Workers<\/span><\/a><\/span>
\nJody Miller and Kristin Carbone-Lopez<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nLynne Haney<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nConstanza Tabbush and Mar\u00eda Florencia Gentile<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nSarah Pemberton<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nCamille Boutron and Chlo\u00e9 Constant<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nJessi Lee Jackson<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe Cultivation and Co-optation of Violence in a California Juvenile Detention Center<\/span><\/a><\/span>
\nJerry Flores<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nSabrina Mahtani<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nConsiderations of Gender in the Commutation Process for Incarcerated Women<\/span><\/a><\/span>
\nCarol Jacobsen and Lora Bex Lempert<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n