Professor Azrini Wahidin1
1University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Azrini Wahidin is the Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney. Her current book, Under Siege: The Role of Women in Liberation Movements Under the Apartheid Regime and the Transition to Peace serves to address the gap in the literature not only to understand the sustained engagement of women’s combatant roles in the liberation struggle, but also to account for the ways in which they experienced and resisted colonialism and state violence. She is an Extraordinary Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest, Stellenbosch University.
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of carcerality, the engendering of punishment for women who are in prison in England and Wales. I will illustrate the relevance of Foucauldian theory in understanding the development of punishment, the use of power, and how capillaries of punishment in prison are directed in a specific way at the female body. It is by understanding the techniques of discipline used in prison that we can demonstrate the gendered application of punishment. Furthermore, this paper will illustrate how conventional typifications of femininity shape the history and current practices in women’s penal establishments, but not as if it were a one-way process. Punishment applied to women’s prisons is grounded not on what women are like but on how women ‘ought’ to behave. The discussion will illustrate how prison becomes a place which is both as and for punishment.