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

• In Event: When Families Pay: Carceral Harms, Financial Debt, and Neoliberal Power

Abstract

This paper, existing at the intersection of penal welfarism and political economy, 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 most vulnerable are deemed deserving of punishment (Fassin 2015), I contend that designated ‘care workers’ are rendered responsible for the crimes of their kin, particularly in the case of the female relatives of American mass shooters (O'Brien 2008). This includes populations who are merited protection solely on the basis of their own idealised innocence, including mothers and battered women.

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, other, and disappear those seen as threatening the social good. I further posit that, in creating folk devils out of mass shooters’ mothers and wives, those who perform the ‘moral labour’ of motherhood are rendered secondary criminals by the state itself. 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, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford