Narratives as Prison ‘Escapes’: Power, Interaction and the co-Construction of the Female Prisoner by Incarcerated Women

Resumo

As a mode of discourse and textual superstructure, narrative plays a nuclear role in construing social reality as well as in creating social identities. That is why the study of narrative is one of the most important investigations of human activity, as Roland Barthes suggested long ago. In fact, it configures the common denominator of cultures of all times and places, in such a way that the notion of a natural narratology is now widely accepted. How prevailing narratives become reified inside the prison walls and how they impact on women serving sentences is what will be explored in this paper. Through listening to and analyzing the accounts of female inmates, we will show the work of narrative as regulation, used upon the female offender’s body, primarily by the cultural and ideological subtexts that proliferate around the processes of deviance and punishment and, secondly, by the formal rules imposed from above, by the prison establishment. This does not mean, however, that narrative cannot also function as a sphere to resist the conventions, practices and procedures with which the institution fulfills certain aims. Neither can it be said that it is not a site to challenge and negotiate frameworks of thought and power relations. Actually, narratives can sprout from strategies of subversion, particularly those that are used by women against the embodiment of hegemonic norms. Drawing on focus groups and focusing on the ways in which women, throughout talk about incarceration, construct the female prisoner’s identity, we will, precisely, reveal that narratives are a powerful site to ‘escape’ both from imprisonment and from the gendered form of punishment upon which it seems to exist.