“Institutions of Intimacy”: What Prisons Can Tell Us About Intimate Life

• In Event: Roundtable: (Re)Theorizing "The Prison" as an Institution

Abstract

Intimacy in prison is rife with confusion and contradictions. Prisons are simultaneously a site of intense isolation from past relationships, as well as a space of total social immersion within an overcrowded, confined environment. Incarcerated intimacy is rendered “public” through constant surveillance, but is shrouded and declared “separate” from broader public life. Prisons are enmeshed within the laws, norms, economy, and history of the state, yet their daily operations and regulations are viewed as exceptional to how the state operates on the “free” population. For these reasons, prisons are a critical, understudied case for examining the blurred lines between the private and personal, and the public and institutional in how people define and navigate intimacy. Drawing on Berlant’s (1998) discussions of how institutions mediate conditions of intimacy, I theorize prison as an “institution of intimacy” with two primary, mutually constitutive functions: prison is both a site of hegemonic control that constrains intimacy and a site of production of intimacy. Theorizing prison as an “institution of intimacy” brings incarcerated life into a broader conversation on the role of public institutions in regulating relationships. This paper breaks new ground by linking theories on work, markets, and intimacy (eg. Zelizer 1994, Berlant 1998, Hoang 2015) with penal theories of community disruption (eg. Foucault 1975, Garland 2001, Wacquant 2009, Roberts 2022) and Black radical theories on social solidarity (eg. Fanon 1961, Davis 2003, Gilmore 2007), to understand prison as a dual space of coerced and revolutionary intimacy that mirrors non-carceral institutional practices.

Author

• Lauren Hagani, University of Chicago