Carceral feminism

In this forum on the geographical frontiers of gender violence, readers are presented with short papers that tackle important issues related to the spatiality, legality, and embodiment of violence against women. In India, Cambodia, and the United Kingdom, the authors offer intersectional, theoretical, and practical analysis about violence against women. Each article reflects on the pressing situation of brutality to find some form of explanation and/or resolution. While the suggestion that toilets will fix the problem in India is succinctly shattered by the authors, and the preposterous contradiction of laws in Cambodia are aptly pointed out, the underlying assumptions about violence against women and the solutions to stop it rest on what Beth Richie (2012) has called carceral feminism. In this commentary, I want to accomplish two goals. First, I will show how carceral feminism undermines the objective of ending violence against women, and second add a clear spatial dimension by delving a little deeper into the issue of the public/private divide that was discussed by Ayona Datta.

Carceral feminism is a kind of feminism that relies on the criminalization of the perpetrator, and often the survivor or victim, as a response to violence against women. The state doles out punishment, which often results in violence against the perpetrator within the penal system such as exemplified by the large number of women and men who are raped in prisons. The response to violence is more violence enacted by the state as punishment is by its nature meant to hurt. Carceral feminism also works under the assumption that individuals are responsible for violence and that we need to fix those individuals. The social work model is also implicated as it treats women as ‘clients’ who need to be helped, not as active agents who can participate in broad community mobilizations to end violence. The underling logic of carceral feminism relies on increased policing, legal frameworks, and arrest, as opposed to political, social, and economic changes that would alter power relationships between men and women.

Carceral feminism has developed over the last 40 years starting as the antirape movement in the 1970s, through contemporary White feminist movements relying on the criminal justice system to eradicate violence against women. These strange bedfellows have in part contributed to the increased power and growth of the prison industrial complex in the United States. They have, for at least pragmatic reasons, partnered with the patriarchal carceral state to ‘end’ violence against women, but the cure has been far worse than the original illness for many women, particularly for women and color. The interventions have revictimized survivors, demonized the memory of the victims. For example in the United States and in other places around the world, reporting a sexual assault to authorities entails retelling and often reliving the attack and responding to questions and sometimes physical exams, which can blame the victim or enact the violence again. The genderscapes of hate described by Anindita Datta also demonstrate the context in which interventions parallel the socially, economically, and politically constructed pathologies associated with survivors and victims of violence against women. Carceral feminism has not decreased violence against women, but it has added the inescapable prospect of rape for incarcerated perpetrators and immigrants in detention centers around the world.

In the United States, the movement toward mass incarceration and immigrant detention centers has been linked to neoliberal economic structures. The growth and privatization of some prisons in tandem with policies that particularly criminalize people of color in dramatic fashion have made millions of dollars for private interests and have become a driving force in the economy. Prisons are one of the biggest employers not only for staff but also for extremely low-paid prison labor. These same economic relationships have perpetuated and aggrandized the power gap between women and men. Power imbalances are a root cause of violence against women (Crenshaw, 1991). In each of the cases examined in this issue, economically marginalized women by cast, religion, or class are in subordinate power positions in relation to men. Again, while having toilets will not solve the issue of violence, broader and more significant attention to economic power issues for women would be a key link in a process to stop violence against women globally. The private development of land occupied by poor families by the lake in Cambodia speaks to the direct profit motive obtained through violence. The class struggles for limited resources and the perceived possibility of people of color taking jobs and economies of lower class Whites in the United Kingdom is also an expression of violence related to economic arrangements and economic power imbalances. The importance of economic structures cannot be overstated. The reasoning of neoliberalism provides power to those who have resources.

In addition to the profit motive associated with state carceral structures is the public/private divided cited by Ayona Datta and others (Bondi, 1998; Duncan, 1996; Fainstein, 2005; Hayden, 1980; Healey, 1997; Miranne and Young, 2000; Muxí Martínez et al, 2011; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2010, 2015). Here the false division of space and society further debilitates the power of women. Women’s association with the private or domestic sphere where less value is placed on the work lessens the prestige and power of those who occupy what we understand as private spaces. The work in domestic private spaces is value free at least in a monetary sense. As Kemp (1994) has argued, women have been tricked by the partnership of patriarchy and capitalism to provide free labor for their families in the name of love and social responsibility. Men on the other hand are associated with the public sector where work has a monetary value that elevates it both in societal and in political prestige. The imbalance of public and private space access and association is a significant barrier to women’s power parity with men.

While some might suggest that the improvement of the status of women in the private sphere would enable a shift in power, dissolving the divide may be a better strategy. Continuing to acknowledge and respect the public and private divide does a disservice to ending violence against women since the problem of violence occurs in all spaces. We need to figure out ways to analyze and take action to end violence that overcomes that debilitating focus on public and private sectors. I have proposed de-emphasizing the false divide of public and private economic, political, and social geographies by focusing on bodies as a scale of information gathering and the movement of bodies in and within communities (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante 2015). By foreshadowing bodies, the power and perception of the public or private spaces is diminished, since the body does not usually exist in one or the other exclusively. By examining all the different kinds of violence as a whole system of oppression or as a ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 2002), we are able to take action that is more holistic because the formation of the problem is not sidelined by invalid distinctions of public and private places that uphold patriarchal and capitalist constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and so on in spatial formations.

The combination of carceral feminisms, which rely on state punishment and criminal justice systems as well as the false division of public and private spaces in the context of neoliberal economic arraignments exacerbates women’s lack of power positions in relation to men. A two-pronged approach, which takes the responsibility of responding to violence away from the confines of state punishment, for example in Chicago and into community-level interventions, initiated from within the community (see the community accountability model at http://www.incitenational.org/page/communityaccountability), along with economic, social, and political changes that diminish the power of the public/private divide would go a long way to reimaging and rebuilding communities free of violence against women.