Motherhood at the Margin: Stigma, Social Ties, and the Political Economy of Punishment

• In Event: Collateral Damage - The Impact of Incarceration in the Lives of Women

Abstract

This paper, existing at the intersection of prisoners' families research, penal politics, and social anthropology, draws on Garbarino's (1995) conceptualisation of familial toxicity to suggest that 'caregivers' on the margins are systematically punished by state actors on account of their relationship to criminal offenders. Adopting an understanding of 'the State' as a violent means through which the vulnerable are deemed deserving of punishment––often on the basis of their own marginality––I contend that designated 'care workers' are rendered collaterally responsible for the crimes of their kin.

Building on recent work by sociologist Imogen Tyler (2020), I offer a theoretical reconsideration of stigma as a political tool operated by state institutions to shame and disappear those seen as threatening to normative social ties. I posit that, in creating folk devils out of offenders' mothers, those who perform the 'moral labour' of motherhood are rendered secondary criminals by the State.

Highlighting the myriad ways in which intersectional experiences of marginalisation shape vulnerable women's experiences with the carceral state, this paper considers the role of stigma in stratifying, excluding, and punishing the kin of offenders––often under the guise of state protection and paradoxical humanitarian logics.

Author

• Adam Kluge, University of Oxford, Centre for Criminology