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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Like much recent critical criminology, feminist criminology has been influenced by a "Foucault effect" (see Smart 1989; Howe 1994). The appeal and promise of Michel Foucault's lectures and essays on governmentality are their interesting possibilities for the analysis of power outside, or on the periphery of, the formal state apparatus (Pavlich 1996), the micro-physics of power, and how populations are governed via techniques of self-regulation (Macleod and Durrheim 2002). In this article, I identify a more troubling aspect of the governmentality gaze on criminalized and imprisoned women with respect to a loss of women's voices and their experiences of social exclusion, as well as the disappearance of praxis from critical Foucauldian-inspired feminist criminology. Specifically, I show how governmentality's claim that "the state has no essential necessity or functionality" (Rose and Miller 1992, cited in Curtis 1995: 580) complements the current regime of neo-liberalism. Like neo-liberalism, governmentality eschews causality of social problems and does not account for the large-scale relations of exploitation and domination that underpin the changing material conditions--the crisis of capital and the demise of welfarism--that have transformed the forms and programs of power (Curtis 1995). I question whether feminist criminologists can suitably theorize about and advocate for criminalized and imprisoned women without fully acknowledging the economic and social impacts of neo-liberalism. To this end, I suggest a re-imagining of a critical feminist criminology so that questions of "why" and "what is to be done" may be addressed.
Losing ground: Feminist criminologies in neo-liberal times
In the early 1970s, powerful Western economies, including the United States, Britain, and, to a lesser degree, Canada, saw a crisis of production that gave way to a neo-liberal economic model premised on deregulation, privatization, and individualism (Ratner and McMullan 1983). Neo-liberal economics were concomitantly legitimated by a neo-conservative political ideology that further entrenched a reactionary criminal justice system (Platt 1987). Administrative criminologists such as James Q. Wilson in the United States argued that street crime was brought on by "the shiftless poor who were dangerous and permissive people victimizing decent citizens" (1977, cited in Edsall 1991: 214). Thus, neo-liberalism introduced massive cuts in spending on social services, health, and education, while neo-conservative political strategies bolstered coercive institutions such as the military, police, and prisons (Platt and Takagi 1977).
The feminist project at this time, however, shifted toward a politics of identity. As Nancy Fraser (2005) aptly puts it, North American feminism decoupled culture from the political economy just as neo-liberalism was on the rise: "The timing could not have been worse. The shift to a culturalized politics of recognition occurred at precisely the moment when neoliberalism was staging its spectacular comeback" (2005: 5).
In Canada, during the 1980s, the politics of identity underpinned key law and policy reforms. In many ways, these were heady times for feminist criminologists in Canada as they watched decades of activism finally begin to pay off. Significant prison reforms were underway (CSC 1990); women offenders were no longer "correctional afterthoughts" (Fabiano and Ross 1989); domestic violence was taken seriously by the criminal justice system (Johnson 1996); and important statutory changes to sexual assault laws were implemented (Roberts and Mohr 1994).
By the mid-1990s, however, things started to unravel. More women were being incarcerated, especially black and Native women (Pollack 2000, 2004; Snider 1994, 2003). Despite promises to the contrary, some women prisoners continued to be confined inside men's maximum-security prisons (Pate 2005). In 1996, a commission of inquiry headed by Madame Justice Louise Arbour was set up following the strip-searching of eight women prisoners by a male Institutional Emergency Response Team in full riot gear, followed by the involuntary transfer of six women to segregation in cells adjacent to a men's sex offender treatment unit. The Arbour Report "found a culture of disrespect for the rule of law and a long history of unequal treatment of women prisoners" (Arbour 1996: 239, cited in Horri, Parkes, and Pate 2006). As well, a moral panic was emerging, claiming that women were men's equals in violence (Pearson 1997; Minaker and Snider 2006). Women were increasingly charged under zero-tolerance protocols for domestic violence when calling the police for protection (Snider 1994; Wood 2001). Several constitutional challenges were launched against the "rape shield provision" of the criminal code, threatening to dismantle hard-won protections of women's privacy (Busby 1997). (2)
Critical feminist criminology seemed to be at a crossroads. Laureen Snider (1994) questioned the feminist practice of relying on the criminal justice system and its ethic of punishment. Elizabeth Comack (1999) pointed out that feminist criminology still remained on the margins of the discipline and had constructed a narrow image of women as victims of male violence, simplifying the role of violence in women's lives. As well, critical race scholars (Rice 1990) saw white feminist criminologists as engaged in ethnocentric thinking and called for a much broader conceptual framework to examine the interrelationship of race, class, and gender in historical context.
This fracturing of critical...
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