Prison Cultures

Aylwyn Walsh

Description

Prison Cultures offers the first systematic examination of women in prison and performances in and of the institution. Using a feminist approach to reach beyond tropes of 'bad girls' and simplistic inside vs. outside dynamics, it examines how cultural products can perpetuate or disrupt hegemonic understandings of the world of prisons. The book identifies how and why prison functions as a fixed field and postulates new ways of viewing performances in and of prison that trouble the institution, with a primary focus on the United Kingdom and examples from popular culture. A new contribution to the fields of feminist cultural criticism and prison studies, Aylwyn Walsh explores how the development of a theory of resistance and desire is central to the understanding of women’s incarceration. It problematizes the prevalence of purely literary analysis or case studies that proffer particular models of arts practice as transformative of offending behaviour.

Introduction

Chapter One: Prison Cultures Habitus and ‘Tragic Containment’

Chapter Two: Genealogies of Prison as Performance: Towards a Theory of Simulating the Cage

Chapter Three: Trauma, Strategies and Tactics: Problems of Performance in Prison

Chapter Four: Race, Space and Violence

Chapter Five: Prison Lesbians: Screening Intimacy and Desire

Chapter Six: Performance through Prison: Institutional Ghosts and Traces of the Traumatic

Paradoxes of Prison Cultures

Bibliography

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• Performing Arts
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Anthropology
• General
• Drama
• Social
• Performance
• Prison
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381061
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Cover image: Production Shot, Sweatbox. Produced by Clean Break, 2016.
Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-105-4
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-106-1
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-107-8
Printed and bound by Short Run Press Limited, UK.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) Licence. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction
Chapter One: Prison Cultures: Habitus and ‘Tragic Containment’
Chapter Two: Genealogies of Prison as Performance: Towards a Theory of Simulating the Cage
Chapter Three: Trauma, Strategies and Tactics: Problems of Performance in Prison
Chapter Four: Race, Space and Violence
Chapter Five: Prison Lesbians: Screening Intimacy and Desire
Chapter Six: Performance through Prison: Institutional Ghosts and Traces of the Traumatic
Conclusion: Paradoxes of Prison Cultures
Bibliography
Filmography
Live Performances
Index
Acknowledgements

Dedicated to Arlene and Tony Walsh – with love and thanks for your consistent and generous support. I am in debt for the depth and extent of love I am lucky to have enjoyed throughout my life. I should like to offer my gratitude to my primary mentors and inspiration in the field of prison and performance: Alex Sutherland and Caoimhe McAvinchey who both exhibit integrity and vision in their practice with people in prison, and commitment to social justice in scholarship.
Much of the work has been informed by and threaded through with affect, fervour and inspiration that comes from former experience as an artist working in criminal justice with the Writers in Prison Network, National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance, as well as in prisons in South Africa. For work that was informative but not explicitly referenced here, I offer thanks to Mary Fox and women at HMP Drake Hall with the support of the National Offender Management Service (now HMPPS). The company Clean Break has enjoyed a longstanding reach in relation to women in the criminal justice system and has also been significant in my professional life. Thanks to Clean Break Theatre Company – especially Anna Hermann and Lucy Perman – for generosity and access to production images. Open Clasp Theatre Company and Geese Theatre Company also offered support in the form of publicity materials.
Gratitude to my Ph.D. supervisor Patrick Duggan, who was unwavering in his support of the project that led to this monograph. Thanks also to Victor Ukaegbu and the graduate school from University of Northampton. Early versions of the work were awarded the Helsinki Prize (IFTR) and the TaPRA PG essay prize, which enabled conference attendance and development. The University of Lincoln’s research leave enabled me to disseminate much of the work and explore new avenues, and I thank Dominic Symonds and Karen Savage. My current workplace has continued to offer outstanding support. From the University of Leeds’ School of Performance and Cultural Industries: Alice O’Grady, Joslin McKinney, as well as Sarah Bartley, Emma Bennett, Rebecca Collins, Leila Jancovich and George Rodosthenous for modelling collegiality. I was given support for research assistance from the able Kelli Zezulka.
Some of my thinking developed through working on collaborative performance with students at the University of Leeds in the production Held (2017) and Stand to A Count (2018), including collaborators WY-Fi, the Probation Teams at Ripon House, Cardigan House and Magistrate’s Court, Leeds. Thanks to Tanja Schult and her careful engagement with practice in working through trauma and performativity for a piece on Painful Pasts . For engaging with earlier drafts with precision and care, Marissia Frakgou, Marilena Zaroulia and Sita Popat, my appreciation.
Friends and companions are due love and respect too: Ananda Breed, Robert Dean, Tobi Moss and Siobhán O’Gorman. My family has been constant and generous in their support. In addition to my parents, devotion and thanks to my brother, Aidan and my grandmother, Love. I take such delight in Anna Davidson – thanks for adventures in love and learning.
I would like to acknowledge the importance of developing work through presenting at Quorum, QMUL; International Federation of Theatre Research IFTR; TaPRA Performance, Identity and Community working group; Rhodes University Drama Department; and the University of Roehampton’s seminar series for inviting me to present work. At the University of Lincoln’s seminar series Critical Encounters, Justin Hunt helped me work through the formulation of prison as performance. I was honoured to deliver the keynote presentation at the Manchester Metropolitan University PG conference (2017). My collaborator Andrea Zittlau at the University of Rostock invited me to her seminar series – an outing for some of the ideas presented here.
Some small extracts from chapters have been extended from essays published in Chapter Three as ‘Staging women in prison: Clean Break Theatre company’s dramaturgy of the cage’ (Walsh 2016). Some ideas from Chapter One are based on ‘(En)gendering Habitus: Women, Prison, Resistance’ (Walsh 2014). The initial ideas for Chapter Two were developed in ‘Performing prisons, performing punishment: The banality of the cell in contemporary theatre’ (Walsh 2012a).
Thanks also to Intellect editors and reviewers for their comments and engagement that have undoubtedly improved the work.
Finally, my respect and solidarity to all the folks I have collaborated with behind bars throughout the years – practitioners and prisoners: Aluta Continua .
Figures permissions
Helen Maybanks and Donmar Warehouse
Clean Break Theatre Company
Open Clasp Theatre Company
List of Figures

Figure 1: Cycle of tragic containment / Cycles of Incarceration.
Figure 2: Panopticon. Ahrens, L. (2008), ‘Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and their Children’, The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (Artist: Susan Willmarth), p. 75.
Figure 3: Production Shot: Sweatbox. Produced by Clean Break, 2016.
Figure 4: Production shot: There are Mountains , 2012 HMP Askham Grange. Produced by Clean Break.
Figure 5: Keith Pattison, Open Clasp Key Change. Performers: Jessica Johnson and Christina Berriman Dawson.
Figure 6: Production shot: This Wide Night , Moss, 2009. Produced by Clean Break.
Figure 7: Production shot: PESTS , Franzmann, 2014. Produced by Clean Break.
Figure 8: Ensemble in Julius Caesar (Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare Trilogy). Photographer, Helen Maybanks. Reproduced with permission.
Introduction
Introducing Prison Cultures
Many of the memories I have of working as a creative artist in prison swing between sensory overload, moments of joy and the triumph of pedagogic success when connecting with someone unexpectedly. These stimulating times were often matched by sheer frustration at the complexity of managing expectations. My endeavours to use performance, creative writing and filmmaking with prisoners were underscored by a desire to stimulate imaginations beyond institutional rhythms. The impetus for thinking through Prison Cultures emerges in between these sometimes oppositional forces – between the desire to create something and the resistance to institutionalization.
Likewise, any search through my viewing histories or record of attendance at performance would confirm a certain relish for popular media that is about prison – including crime drama, detective fiction and stories that make accounts of containment and freedom, desire and resistance. I seek out cultural productions that account for wider social understandings of crime and justice. My thinking in this book is inflected by my own experiences of prison as a theatre practitioner and researcher, though my analysis primarily works through accounts of representations on TV and on stage. In recent times, the imagery of criminal justice as a set of processes that can be captured and mediated in order to draw attention to its operations has been foregrounded by documentation such as dash-cam footage, mobile phone video documentation of police brutality. Performance, in this context, becomes valuable as a method – not merely for disseminating ideas about prison but for working through embodied experiences, affects and events.
There has been a wealth of artistic material that testifies to the significance of prison as a cultural construct. Visual representations include the urgent and exhaustive documentary about race and criminal justice in the United States by Ava duVernay The 13th (Netflix 2017). These are counterposed by fictional works such as the playful novel Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood (2017), which narrates The Tempest as a revenge tale staged in a prison to hilarious effect. Historical works and sites of incarceration are being dynamized in artworks such as Artangel’s (2016) re-staging of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the site of Reading Gaol, read by celebrities including Patti Smith (Gormley and Monzani 2016). In the late 1970s, artist Tehching Hsieh produced several durational performances that included incarcerating himself in a cage for a year in his series of Year Performances (Heathfield and Hsieh 2015). In a wide-ranging project on medical hi