'A Productive Wage Earning Man': Neoliberal Masculinities, Race and Prisoner Reentry Discourse

• In Event: Understanding the Desistance Process

Abstract

This paper analyzes how gendered and racialized notions of black fatherhood and labor constitute prisoner reentry discourse in the Midwest. I intervene in theories of neoliberalism by showing how neoliberal political rationalities borrow from other ideologies in order to find purchase in a particular locale. Neoliberal notions of productive, self-governing citizens rely on older moralizing discourses that figure formerly imprisoned black men as “failed fathers” (as one parenting counselor in my research phrased it) and as lacking in work ethic. I argue that in order to understand the ideological work that ‘prisoner reentry’ is doing in this context, we must see how this discursive formation continues to be informed by mass imprisonment’s constitutive racial imaginings. Using a combination of ethnography and critical discourse analysis, this study finds that narratives of “responsible fatherhood” and employment opportunities were grounded in a pathologizing and hetero-normative view of black masculinity and labor. Prisoner reentry must be situated within a politics of abolition in order to genuinely transformation the conditions of mass imprisonment's emergence.

Author

• Renee M. Byrd, Humboldt State University