Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
Over the past twenty-five years, a range of critical perspectivesMarxist, poststructuralist and, less frequently, feministhas been brought to bear on the subject of punishment and, in particular, on the question of imprisonment in western capitalist societies. Considered together, these critical views constitute a formidable challenge to traditional ways of conceptualizing punishment. Yet, for all the advances made, the new critical perspectives remain deeply flawed in a significant, but as yet barely acknowledged waywith very few exceptions they are profoundly masculinist. Punish and Critique begins the task of exploring what a theoretically-informed feminist analysis of penality might look like and, in the process, uncovers a series of disjunctions in the recent critical analysesfor example, disjunctions between "social histories" of prison regimes imposed on men and feminist histories of the imprisonment of women. Most crucially, the book unveils radical disengagement between two currentcritical theoretical projects: the masculinist, analyzing the emergence of punishment regimes in the context of the state's power to punish and the feminist, mapping the differential impact of disciplinary power on lived female bodies. In Punish and Critique Adrian Howe argues that a more fully social understanding of punishment must be informed by feminist research on women's imprisonment and by poststructuralist studies of the disciplining of women's bodies.