Commemorating Captive Women: Representations of Criminalized and Incarcerated Women in Canadian Penal History Museums

Abstract

In the contemporary era of mass incarceration, predominantly marginalized populations struggle to escape the looming shadow of the ever-expansive prison industrial complex. As policies shift and more people are finding themselves under the direct or indirect control of carceral nation states (Walmsley 2013), it is becoming increasingly important to analyse processes that contribute to the production and perpetuation of punitive discourses. Despite the seemingly permanent physical and symbolic presence of prisons across social and cultural landscapes (Brown 2009; Davis 2003), discourses surrounding these institutions often fail to reflect the lived realities suffered by prisoners behind prison walls. This phenomenon is especially prevalent for incarcerated women, about whom administrators and academics alike have suffered a “collective amnesia” (Hannah-Moffat and Shaw 2000). Indeed, criminalized women and the gendered nature of criminalized harms, as well as female prisoners’ gendered needs and acute experiences of victimization, largely remain a correctional afterthought (Jiang and Winfree 2006; Parkes and Pate 2006). Women’s own voices discussing their experiences of criminalization and imprisonment tend to be marginalized within mainstream discourse, making it extremely important to explore whatever representations do exist (Wilson 2008). Due to the relative scarcity of direct knowledge about criminalization and imprisonment produced by those who have directly experienced these processes (Dewar and Fredericksen 2003; Gaucher 1988), popular representations found in news and entertainment media figure enormously in the shaping of public knowledge and awareness of “crime,” penal institutions, and the people imprisoned within them (Surette 2011).