From Failed to Rehabilitated Femininity: Women’s Narratives and Images of Personal Transformation Post-Incarceration

• In Event: 570 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Paper Session. Sex, Gender, and Crime, Law, and Deviance

Abstract

Scholarship on post-incarceration experiences highlights the narrative and personal transformation processes individuals undergo as they attempt to transition from jail and prison to life on the outside (Flores 2014; Leverentz 2014; Maruna 2001; Miller 2014; Opsal 2011; Wyse 2013). In this paper, I draw on research with formerly incarcerated women to examine how these processes are raced and gendered. Based on in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews with 36 women, I examine women’s accounts of personal transformation from a “failed” femininity to a “rehabilitated” femininity in five key areas: domesticity, appearance, romantic relationships, motherhood, and employment. Throughout each area, I draw attention to the “clean/dirty dichotomy” (Harris and McElrath 2012) that reflected women’s shifting sense of self from past “addicted,” “criminal” selves to current “sober,” “rehabilitated” selves. On one hand, the rehabilitated femininity that women worked to achieve reinforced the neoliberal rhetoric of personal responsibility and individual failings that quell social critique. On the other hand, by claiming rehabilitated femininity, women contested oppressive “controlling images” (Collins 2000) they had encountered throughout their lives as women of color living in severely economically disadvantaged, racially segregated communities. By conceptualizing reentry as a state institution (Bumiller 2013; Miller 2014; Wacquant 2010), I show how women’s raced and gendered processes of personal transformation reflect a state project to direct criminalized people to certain ways of being.

Author

• Cesraea Rumpf, Fayetteville State University