Disciplining Women/Disciplining Bodies: Exploring how Women Negotiate Health and Bodily Aesthetic in the Carceral Context

Abstract

Traditionally, much criminological research has focused on male complexities of confinement, sidelining the experiences of federally and especially provincially incarcerated women in Canada. This thesis seeks to capture some of the experiences and challenges faced by incarcerated women as they attempt to negotiate agency and maintain choice and control over their health and bodies while inside correctional institutions. In order to do so, this study draws from Foucaultian-inspired concepts of discipline, governance, regulation, power, and resistance as a means to theoretically analyze the daily, often strategic, actions of women prisoners.

This research is qualitative, and emerges from the data secured through in depth interviews with twelve previously incarcerated women, who were asked to speak of their experiences inside Canadian prisons with respect to issues of choice and control over hygiene, diet, exercise, and access to over-the-counter medication. The data were coded and organized into three substantial themes: opportunity for choice or learned dependence, the ‘layering’ of punishment, and creating space for agency.

The analysis revealed that incarcerated women attempt to manage and maintain control over their health but meet ongoing punitive carceral responses when making decisions about their bodies that conflict with institutional mandates, discourses, or goals. Without the opportunity to perform culturally accepted norms of health and femininity, women in prison fail to achieve a positive or ‘good’ womanly status, which comes to impact their self-worth, self-esteem, and identity. These findings create direct implications for Corrections, as they inevitably produce docile and institutionally dependent women rather than responsible and productive citizens, the stated rehabilitational goal of correctional services.