La Voz de la Cárcel: challenging power and constructing new subjectivities from behind bars in post-Chávez Venezuela

• In Event: Gangs, Prison Governance, Gender & 'Rehabilitation' in Latin America - 2 of 2

Abstract

This paper explores how new political subjectivies are being forged inside of Venezuela's prisons. People incarcerated in Venezuela, largely coming from poor communities, must navigate their relationship with state in the context of class-based political polarization, pro-poor government discourse and their own experiences of marginalization and incarceration. In this paper, I do discourse analysis of the articles and drawings in the first edition of the inmate-run newspaper La voz de la cárcel, to explore the making of new political subjectivities in post-Chávez Venezuela. I also draw from interviews that I conducted with the three founders of the newspaper—a poet, socialist, and hip-hopero—in the internally-run San Felipe prison in the Venezuelan state of Yaracuy. I examine how the authors of the newspaper dispute government claims about prisons; resist objectification by the media and stigmatization by society at large; utilize government discourse and “socialist” ideas common in popular organizing in Venezuela; and assert the agency of incarcerated people. Through their attempt to represent “la masa penitenciaria,” and “la cultura penitenciaria,” they produce new subjectivities that attempt to reshape the prison system and social world by creating new knowledges, new identities and new meanings about prison in Venezuela.

Author

• Cory Fischer-Hoffman