Caged (no)bodies: Exploring the racialized and gendered politics of incarceration of Black women in the Canadian prison system

In Canada, the adage 'too few to count' has relegated studies on incarcerated Black women to the margins of social science and sociological inquiry. Social justice initiatives investigating the lived experiences of incarcerated Black women in federal institutions have seldom been explored. This dissertation presents an integration and subsequent exploration into how incarceration has detrimentally affected the socio-economic status of Black women in the 21st century. In our current local and global environment, the racial, economic, and political marginalization of women is a contributing factor related to the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated Black women.;This study uses ten qualitative interviews with incarcerated Black women in order to explore how social relations such as poverty, violence against women, racism and classism are historically connected to the contemporary over-representation of incarcerated Black women. This dissertation is 'ethnographically driven' (see Saleh-Hanna, 2008). This project was designed in such a way that the analyses from the interviews support many of the theoretical frameworks argued in the research. As such, this work relies heavily on qualitative parameters as a means to support theoretical arguments. This dissertation is grounded in theory; however, it has also been designed to tell stories and/or narrative accounts that serve as micro-maquettes for exploring some of the conceptual arguments being put forth. This research draws on feminist theories of law, critical criminology, critical race and racism, and citizenship, in order to examine the social implications of incarceration and the Black woman body politic. Additionally, a move towards Canadian Black Feminist Criminology explores how theories of race and racism are explicitly connected to gendered incarceration and the social reproduction of citizenship and belonging; when situated in a Canadian context Black Feminist Criminology is identified as a tool for future critical feminist criminological theorizing and social activist praxis.