Setting:
Where does your mind go at the mentioning of “Man parts.” Is it your sexy place? Is it clinical? like a doctor’s office? Is it somewhere between some legs? or a place all in your head?
MR. PROVE-IT
(continuing from the exact breath exhaled at the end of Part 3b, with emotional audio air quotes.)
“…Masculinity!” Women in pop culture can’t win. They’ve had to fight hard to be more than objects for straight-male ogling, and even when they succeed in taking on roles of authority beyond their sexual availability to the most powerful male in the room, they have their lives and actions scrutinized in ways that men would never allow. Fuck, this 2016 presidential campaign pretty much proves the point in a conversation I am sure we will have later about the Clintons.
Men, consciously or not, often fail to see the value of the work women do.
As men investigating a women’s prison, we’ve got to be real about our biases and keep an eye on ourselves and each other not to slip into shitty behaviors. That might sound easy, but think about it for a moment.
An investigation is an examination of a subject. Historically, this means believing that we were looking at subject from a distance that allows for an “objective view” of whatever we are looking at. When the investigator is a man, and the subject of the investigation is a women’s prison, the tradition is for us to treat the women we talk to, or even just research, during this investigation like the objects of our study. That many of these women will be incarcerated only gives us more power to fuck up and cause someone harm without respecting her or recognizing her power to speak for herself and set the record straight.
Look at the media out there about “women behind bars:”
The first thing that came up for me in a Google search of those tag words shows that Women Behind Bars is the English title for a 1975 French sexploitation film, Des diamants pour l’enfer. The movie poster for the films shows images of naked women chained to walls and tortured. People who liked this film also liked movies like, SADOMANIA, Barbed Wire Dolls and Sexy Sisters, all of which have equally suggestive promotional posters.
In 2008, Women Behind Bars became a true crime TV show that lasted for three seasons, dramatizing and reenacting the cases of famous women criminals. Maybe this “docu-tainment” show was less sexually exploitative of the women it was showing, but the focus was on still on sensualizing the woman as criminal, and not investigating the conditions of her captivity. And even within the context of being presented as non-fiction, the relationship between femininity, sexuality and violence was a theme often explored by the show, with the first episode of the first season looking at the case of Stacey Lanart, a Missouri woman, who was raped by her father for years, ignored by her family when she tried to report him, and eventually resorted to shooting him twice while he slept.
The most recent show to portray women’s incarceration, Orange Is the New Black, tries harder than most previous efforts to highlight the real problems faced by women in prison. However, the show is still a work of fiction that still hams up women’s sexual relationships as one of its major selling points.
For many men, thinking about women in manacles is a sexual fantasy about having power and control over an object of desire. While the possibility of sexual violence in women’s prison is a source of erotic imagination for many men, Sexual violence in men’s prison is a terrifying cautionary tale often reinforced as a joke. In neither case do men outside of prison like to think about the horrific realities of sexual exploitation in prisons, or the daily lives of people living under the threat of being sexually assaulted while incarcerated.
Being a man investigating a women’s prison means needing to be aware of this history and how easily the real issues of women in prison can be overshadowed by assumptions about sexuality and violence in institutions. It also means needing to push ourselves to look beyond sex and violence in our investigation, so that we do not reduce women in prison to nothing more than sexual victims, or ignore the host of other issues women in prison face: like being moved hundreds of miles from their families, having limited access to physical and mental health care and being stigmatized for life as a criminal.
MR. WHINEY
(MR. WHINEY responds quickly in a tone of self-righteous self-reproach.)
The fact that our first concerns as investigators were issues of sexuality and violence exemplifies the limitations of our male investigative perspective, and the terror women must face being incarcerated in a patriarchal society.
Nothing about the theoretical purpose of women’s incarceration should lead to thoughts of sexual violence, except for the fact that sexual violence against women is culturally rampant in America, and that the risk of sexual violence for men as well as women in prison, is one of the most commonly portrayed and accepted consequences of incarceration.
Books have been written about the hierarchical implications of sexual identity and authority as established in society through institutions of incarceration, and anyone interested in thinking more deeply about these relationships might want to consult the philosophical writings of Michael Foucault. But you are pointing out that we have a responsibility not to let those issues become the only ones we are concerned with, correct?
MR. PROVE-IT
Uh, yeah, that’s what I said wasn’t it?
(waits a beat to see if MR. WHINEY responds before continuing.)
We gotta be aware of the roles we can fall into as researchers, and make sure we don’t reduce the stories of any of the women we investigate into tales of their sexual objectification that we then go on to exploit for our own benefit.
We also gotta be real about the fact that our project is not a one-sided look at women’s prisons that is going to focus only on the lives of women behind bars. For one, women are already telling their own stories about these experiences and we should be seeking those out rather than trying to speak over them. For another, the scope of our project is more about the role of McPherson’s Unit in the world than just the prisoners’ roles within McPherson. We will have to look at some stories of women who have been locked up there because their stories are THE story of McPherson’s Unit. But, when we do so, it will be in relationship to a specific issue of justice and incarceration we are trying to highlight. And all the stories we tell are ones synthesized from secondary sources, not the women themselves.
MR. WHINEY
Some members of our audience will probably feel cheated by that acknowledgement, that this project was undertaken without directly soliciting the voices of incarcerated women, and those feelings are probably justified.
If you made yourself an audience to this investigation under the assumptions that you were going to get an in-depth exposé about the lives of women in prison, you have come to the wrong place. The good news is, there are phenomenal books, written by women, that contain the stories of real women who have lived through, or are living through, years of incarceration.
Read them.
Read Inside This Place, Not of It, compiled and edited by Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman. Read Assata, by Assata Shakur. Read Doing Time: 25 years of Prison Writing, and seek out the many voices of the women you can find in there.
I give you my most passionate blessing to put this investigation down right now to go read those books. Only one rather quiet, tiny, voice of the many collected here is going to feel bad if you never come back to our investigation. If you abandon us in pursuit of a more powerful or direct look at women’s carceral experiences, we will not consider our mission a complete failure.
MR. PROVE-IT
You are annoying, as always, but you are also correct.
Projects that focus on the voices of women talking about their own experiences in prison are important. Some already exist and should be read. More need to be written, and that project very well could be more important in the grand scheme of things than anything this investigation will accomplish. But the scope of this project is to think about a specific women’s prison and its role in the world, and we cannot pretend like any prison exists exclusively for the people held inside of it.
MR. WHINEY
The voices of prisoners are too often deliberately silenced.
We do not want our investigation to lead any audience into thinking that listening to us excuses them from seeking out additional voices on the issue of women’s incarceration in the United States. But we can use our position as investigators to invite you, as audience members, into the project of critically examining the voices calling for and maintaining prisons, and why we as a society continue to let our current practices of incarceration to perpetuate themselves.
We hope, that by making our limitations painfully transparent, we can share our hours of research and listening to as many different voices on the subject of McPherson’s Unit as we can, to help create a richer and more complete picture of what that building is doing there at 302 Corrections Drive.