‘We Will Be Written Out of History’: Feminist Challenges to Carceral Violence and the Activist Archive
Keywords:
Anti-carceral feminism, abolition, penal reform, women’s imprisonment, activist knowledge, Feminismo anticarcelario, abolición, reforma penal, encarcelamiento de mujeres, conocimiento activistaAbstract
Feminist activism has played an important role in documenting, highlighting and challenging carceral violence against women within and beyond prison walls. Using the campaign against the punitive segregation of women in high-security men’s prisons in the 1980s and 1990s in Victoria, Australia, as a case study, we illustrate the value of the activist archive for critical prisons research. The activist archive has the potential to expose continuities in carceral violence, highlight the limitations and potentialities of legal and official oversight processes, and debunk official rhetoric of the prison’s reformative and rehabilitative potential. Our discussion demonstrates the extent to which the activist archive can yield a powerful arsenal of accounts, critiques and organising strategies for anti-carceral feminist movements.
El activismo feminista ha desempeñado un importante papel a la hora de documentar, subrayar y cuestionar la violencia carcelaria contra las mujeres, dentro y fuera de las prisiones. Utilizando como estudio de caso la campaña contra la segregación punitiva de mujeres en prisiones de alta seguridad para hombres en los años 80 y 90 en Victoria, Australia, ilustramos el valor del archivo del activismo para la investigación crítica sobre las prisiones. Dicho archivo tiene el potencial de exponer la continuidad de la violencia carcelaria, subrayar las limitaciones y potencialidades de los procesos de revisión legales y oficiales, y desmontar el discurso oficial sobre la capacidad reformatoria y rehabilitadora de la prisión. Nuestra tesis demuestra que el archivo activista puede dotar al movimiento feminista anticarcelario de un rico muestrario de testimonios, críticas y estrategias organizativas.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-0929
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 380
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.