Punish and Critique

Over the past twenty-five years, a range of critical perspectives--Marxist, poststructuralist and, less frequently, feminist--has been brought to bear on the subject of punishment and, in particular, on the question of imprisonment in western capitalist societies. Considered together, these critical views constitute a formidable challenge to traditional ways of conceptualizing punishment. Yet, for all the advances made, the new critical perspectives remain deeply flawed in a significant, but as yet barely acknowledged way--with very few exceptions they are profoundly masculinist.Punish and Critiquebegins the task of exploring what a theoretically-informed feminist analysis of penality might look like and, in the process, uncovers a series of disjunctions in the recent critical analyses--for example, disjunctions between "social histories" of prison regimes imposed on men and feminist histories of the imprisonment of women. Most crucially, the book unveils radical disengagement between two currentcritical theoretical projects: the masculinist, analyzing the emergence of punishment regimes in the context of the state's power to punish and the feminist, mapping the differential impact of disciplinary power on lived female bodies. InPunish and CritiqueAdrian Howe argues that a more fully social understanding of punishment must be informed by feminist research on women's imprisonment and by poststructuralist studies of the disciplining of women's bodies.

Adrian Howe is Lecturer in Legal Studies at La Trobe University, Australia.