Book Review: Embodying Punishment – Emotions, Identities, and Lived Experiences in Women’s Prisons
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919896944 |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Author | Ann-Karina Henriksen |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
References
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ANASTASIA CHAMBERLEN, Embodying Punishment – Emotions, Identities, and Lived Experiences in
Women’sPrisons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 288, ISBN 9780198749240, £70 (hbk).
The book is a valuable, well written and empirically rich contribution to the st udy of
confinement as lived, embodied experience. The exploration of women’s experiences
of confinement draws on a qualitative study conducted among 24 women who have
served sentences within the past 6 months in a UK prison. Drawing primarily on
in-depth interviews, the book provides detailed insights into the emotional , sensory
and embodied experience of punishment, control and confinement. The empirical
richness enables advanced theorization of the punishment–body relation, which has
been under-researched within criminology. By combining the sociology of emotions
and embodiment with feminist phenomenology, new insights contribute to advance
an understanding of the body as a site of punishment and control. As argued by
Chamberlen, ‘The pains of confinement are very much written on and expressed
through the prisoners’ body’ (p. 182).
Chamberlen positions her work within critical, feminist scholarship and activism. The
aim of the study is to critically assess the gendered experiences and effects of confine-
ment and to provide documentation for more enduring, unintended effects of punish-
ment. It is argued that punishment is uniquely gendered: ‘It combines a mix of penal and
patriarchal controls and impositions that come together to form in them a sense of double
oppression’ (p. 21). While her starting point is a critical, feminist exploration of penal
power, she maintains a curiosity towards the multitude of experiences that the women’s
narrativesrepresent – even that some women experienceprison as an improvement to their
306 Social & Legal Studies 29(2)
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