Punishing Black Mothers: Gender Responsive Carceral Polices as Reproductive Warfare

• In Event: 20859 - Prisons and the Production of Lives and Deaths

Abstract

For the last few decades, gender responsiveness— strategies meant to help address the supposedly “unique needs and circumstances” of women under carceral supervision and control—has dominated reforms aimed at improving the experiences and outcomes of incarcerated women. However, abolitionists have long problematized such policies as gender-essentializing and contributing to the expansion of carceral power. Yet, rather than understanding the failures to create “kinder, gentler, gender-responsive [women’s] cages” as an indicator that carceral institutions have not meaningfully implemented gender responsive policies, I argue that carceral institutions have always been gender responsive institutions. I contend that the recent turn towards what is labeled as gender responsive carceral policy obscures how carceral institutions actually respond to gender. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women, I show how carceral institutions respond to, construct, and govern gender through a process that I call reproductive warfare: carceral institutions’ weaponization of racial-sexual power meant to deny Black women reproductive and sexual self-determination. I document how carceral institutions wage reproductive warfare in two ways: by (1) falsely invoking gender responsive carceral policies as legitimate, therapeutic, and protective for criminalized women; and (2) explicitly violating the legal reproductive and sexual rights of incarcerated people, but referencing stated or implied commitments to gender responsive policies to dismiss such violations as accidental and/or further evidence of the need for gender responsive carceral policies. Ultimately, I argue that these findings should push us towards abolition feminism as a strategy that meaningfully responds to the gendered needs of all criminalized people.

Author

• Susila Gurusami, University of Illinois-Chicago