| “Doing Time, Reading Crime: Rethinking ‘The Female Criminal,’” combines ethnographic and interpretive work in order to theorize how individuals reading literary texts, and literary texts reading the social world, can help to wrest prisons from their normalized status as the primary means of addressing social problems. My ethnographic archive consists of interviews and group conversations with seventeen women imprisoned in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. My literary archive consists of fiction featuring criminalized women—by Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, Carole Maso, Gayl Jones, Pearl Cleage, and Toni Morrison—and a variety of true crime books. In exploring how the featured readers and texts reproduce, resist, and/or retheorize dominant conceptions of “the female criminal,” I shuttle between literary analysis, readers' responses, discussions of issues such as the criminalization of drug use during pregnancy, and engagements with feminist legal theory, political theory, critical race theory, literary criticism, and criminology.; My chapters demonstrate that a number of contemporary cultural, theoretical, and legal debates converge at the site of female criminality—debates about injury, identity politics, and criminal responsibility; about victimization, agency, and violence; about individual autonomy, “family values,” and relational responsibility; and about policing, race, and nationalism. I explore how the featured texts and readers contribute to alternate forms of literacy for reading these issues. Furthermore, I highlight how selected texts, and readers' creative appropriations of texts, help to stretch the boundaries of our collective political imagination by giving narrative form to a world that cannot be fully realized, articulated, or even imagined within the parameters of existing discourse about women, crime, and punishment. I argue that my literary and ethnographic archives produce invaluable insights for creating a society in which issues of profound social and structural inequality might be treated as matters of collective responsibility, rather than as problems of law and order. |
