Knitting out of the Box: Anticarceral Domesticity and The Radical Imaginaries of Prison Knitting

• In Event: Rituals, Spells, and other ways of healing

Abstract

As coerced labor, therapeutic intervention, and a way to pass time while doing time, prison knitting in the US has frustrated foundational binaries of racial capitalism—labor/leisure, feminine/masculine, consumption/production. After surveying this history, I use interviews with prisoners to argue that contemporary prison knitting brings to life feminist and queer abolitionist visions by cultivating wellbeing, creative exchange, and communities of care. I argue that prison knitting should be understood as a form of anticarceral domesticity through which prisoners use domestic pleasures to refuse the bare life of incarceration, and to imagine new ways of being, inside the prison but not of it.

Presenter

• Pamela Wynne Butler, University of Notre Dame