Affilia

History reveals that the pathway toward carceral feminism was fraught with contradictions. Feminist reform strategies that appeared progressive devolved into mandates contributing to the policies of mass incarceration; frameworks meant to disavow racist myths of violence inherent to communities of color fueled color-blind narratives that cloaked white, middle-class-defined social movement priorities; safety strategies protecting survivors of violence entrapped them into set options violating the right to self-determination. Today’s account of carceral feminism reveals well-intentioned choices leading to often ill-fated outcomes. As the critique of carceral feminism seeps into the discourse of the feminist anti-violence movement, a shift toward new values, policies, and practices holds the possibility of radical new directions. However, there is no reason to assume that this new pathway will be so straightforward. This article centers the dynamic of contradiction to synthesize insights of post-Marxist thought in application to contemporary anti-carceral feminist trends represented by transformative justice options. It also reflects on the recent ascendance of restorative justice and a renewed potential for carceral co-optation. The aim is to illuminate troubled areas of revision and radical alternatives and better navigate inevitable ethical and pragmatic tensions that may define future social movement trajectories.

Historically, research on prisons and prisoners privileges an individualizing framework, when in fact the prison experience is strongly tied to social stratification and collective identities. Informed by the data created for a Photovoice project with former prisoners in South Australia, I contend that contemporary “criminological” knowledge tends to individualize crime through its own privileged view of the world. This individualizing approach seeps into the ways in which criminalized women experience release into the community after a prison sentence, confirming that society does not believe that imprisonment furnishes any form of “rehabilitation.”

There can be no separation between capitalism, the prison industrial complex (PIC), and the violence present in carceral settings. This violence, although to a lesser extent than prisoners, is experienced by social workers selling their labor power within the PIC who are co-opted into believing that they can “make a difference.” Yet, social workers, whose codes of ethics are grounded in a framework of human rights, are witness to abuses of human rights on a daily basis within the PIC. Instead of making a difference, they are coerced into silence and roles of social control. The argument proposed here suggests that social workers must radically rethink the place and purpose of prisons by considering them as a violent response by the state to structural social problems that are experienced as politically perpetrated misery and oppression.

The ever-widening net of racialized and colonial carceral spaces and neoliberal strategies of control of poor and marginalized communities means that social workers are often in positions of complicity with or resistance to (or both) the norms and practices of the carceral state. Feminist praxis can both challenge and inadvertently sustain the prison industrial complex and its harms. Approaches that even tacitly accept some of the basic premises and discourses of correctional frameworks risk being co-opted and transmuted into racialized and colonial control practices. In this article, I use the example of Walls to Bridges Canada, a social justice iteration of the U.S.-based Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, to illustrate the power and significance of feminist praxis that privileges the epistemic vantage point of those who are incarcerated. This article will examine how collaborative work with criminalized and incarcerated women (in classrooms, research studies, and community work) moves beyond “giving voice,” to promoting leadership by those with lived experience and shared collaborative knowledge production.

Addressing mass incarceration through smart decarceration initiatives is one of the Grand Challenges for Social Work named by the American Academy of Social Work Welfare and Research. The exponential growth of the U.S. prison system is largely due to legislation that targets marginalized communities, including people of color, poor people, people with mental illness, and those living with disabilities, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people of all ages. In this article, we seek to complicate the current conversation on smart decarceration by arguing that social workers committed to addressing mass incarceration should engage abolitionist theory, politics, and organizing in their work in order to effectively address the root causes driving the buildup of the prison nation. We engage feminist and queer theories as two theoretical interventions that can guide this work. We next describe how LGBTQ+ youth enter the criminal legal system, highlighting how normative systems of gender and sexuality subject LGBTQ+ youth to punitive policing, surveillance, and discipline. Finally, we share three models of prison abolitionist organizing led by LGBTQ+ people of color as case studies. By examining how these organizations embrace queer and feminist abolitionist frameworks, we identify concrete ways that social workers can adopt abolitionist principles and practices in their work to address mass incarceration.

Among women who give birth, roughly half describe their birth experiences as traumatic. Childbirth trauma is a topic of growing global interest for health and mental health professions. However, social work remains peripheral in this emerging area of scholarship and practice. This article presents a portion of findings from recent feminist narrative social work research exploring women’s narratives of their experiences of emotional distress in childbirth to illustrate the need for increased professional engagement with this important social issue. Analysis of participants’ narratives illustrates how Foucault’s discourse and power/knowledge can be useful in understanding the subtle social forces that shape birth experiences which may result in emotional distress. In this article, I argue the topic of childbirth distress falls within the reproductive rights framework and should be of importance to social workers. The findings presented below are discussed in the context of the International Federation of Social Workers’ ethical principles and its policy statement on women to support this position.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a feminist-based policy analysis to examine the role of power in campus sexual assault policies. This research investigated the role of power in campus policies that are in response to addressing sexual assault using a feminist policy analysis framework. McPhail’s (2003) Feminist-Based Policy Analysis Framework was used to study the policy-setting documents authored by the United States (U.S.) Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault that was established in 2014. Together, these documents encompass the federal guidelines for college campuses’ compliance, rights, and responsibility under Title IX. The Framework provides four questions to consider when analyzing the role of power within a policy. Several strengths of the policies are identified as well as tension between the power of institutions versus the power of student survivors, specifically in mandatory reporting policies. Implications for social work research, practice, and policy are explored along with identifying the study’s limitations and future research suggestions.

Despite recent studies suggesting that treatment-emergent sexual dysfunction (TESD) in women is much more prevalent than previously thought, it is not often discussed between physicians and female patients prior to prescribing psychotropic medication. Missing from the available quantitative research on TESD are stories from the women themselves, their experiences with disclosure or lack thereof, and the impact TESD has had on their sense of self and in their relationships. Concerned that this could have a significant influence on women’s mental, emotional, and sexual health, we conducted a study where we interviewed 10 women who self-identified as experiencing TESD after taking psychotropic medications for their mental health. Semistructured, in-depth interviews were conducted, informed by critical feminist practice, and grounded in feminist standpoint theory. Transcripts were then analyzed using thematic analysis to demonstrate the impact TESD had on the lives of these women. Six themes emerged from the interviews: (1) inadequate disclosure about TESD from physicians, (2) gender-based difference in how TESD is discussed, (3) the experience of physical side effects, (4) emotional responses to side effects, (5) concerns about how the partners of women living with TESD experience it, and (6) the importance of knowledge sharing. We conclude this article with a discussion of how these stories fit within the larger social context.