Men in Flames: Wildfire, Vulnerability, and Gendered Resistance in a U.S. Prison

• In Event: Inmate Culture, Identity, and Transitioning to Release

Abstract

This paper offers a unique contribution to the literature on masculinity in modern U.S. prisons. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research with a specific prison wildfire program in the southwest, I argue that the work of wildland firefighting, along with certain affective experiences this program offers, allows men to perform an inclusive and vulnerable masculinity that is relatively unseen in the current prison system. Further, I argue that this masculinity offers a form of resistance to the structural violence of modern incarceration. Most prison research is done on the prison yard, where hyper-individualistic, racialized, and violent expressions of the self are normalized. Therefore, many theories of prison masculinity are premised on some form of domination. Yet the wildfire program is a space that is physically and symbolically apart from the prison yard, and the work itself reshapes ways that program participants relate to themselves and others. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature on masculinity, identity, risk, and vulnerability, I offer an alternative analysis that complicates standard narratives of what types of masculinity are possible in the carceral era.

Author

• Lindsey Raisa Feldman, University of Arizona