Book Review: Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons
| Date | 01 March 2003 |
| Author | Joe Sim |
| Published date | 01 March 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390301200109 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
MARY BOSWORTH, Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons.
Hampshire: Ashgate, 1999, 199 pp., £49.50.
Penal institutions remain central to the strategies of punishment, regulation and
control that many states have pursued in a world order which despite its alleged
‘newness’ remains subject to the historical dislocations and contradictions inherent in
the search for profit maximization through the ruthless exploitation of domestic and
waged labour power. The ‘looming presence’ (Currie, cited in Gordon, 1998: 146) of
these institutions built on the expansion of the ‘prison industrial complex’ has been
particularly evident in relation to women. In 1999, in California alone, as Angela Davis
has noted ‘the number of incarcerated women.... is almost twice the entire state and
federal women’s population of 1970. In fact, the fastest growing group of prisoners are
Black women’ (Davis, cited in Gordon, 1998). A similar pattern has emerged in
England and Wales: the number of women prisoners nearly doubled between 1996 and
2002, reaching a record 4380 in May 2002. Twenty-five percent of the population were
from ‘black and ethnic minority backgrounds’ (Social Exclusion Unit, 2002: 136).
Running parallel with these developments has been a resurgence in the critical
analysis of women in the penal system which, building on an earlier generation of
studies, has continued to pose questions about the role of the system both in ware-
housing offenders and maintaining and reproducing a hierarchical social order that
remains deeply divided along the fault line of gender as well as of social class, ‘race’,
age and sexuality. At the same time a number of theoretical issues have remained un-
explored. Mary Bosworth’s scholarly and stimulating text critically addresses some
of these unexplored issues by utilizing recent insights derived from critical and
feminist social theory in relation to identity politics and agency. As she notes:
... examining prison through the notions of agency and identity illuminates
elements of the complex relationship between gender and power both inside
and outside the prison. . . . Studying identity extends the boundaries of contem-
porary prison studies by utilizing an alternative, smaller-scale analysis of the
distribution of power. Introducing the issues of agency and identity into an
analysis of imprisonment also requires that criminologists transgress the
boundaries of their discipline and engage with contemporary debates occurring
elsewhere. (pp. 7–8)
The book’s seven chapters build on this theoretical insight through a critical analysis
of the discourses of patriarchal power involved in structuring the lives and
experiences of 52 women in three prisons in England. Crucially, Bosworth is
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200303) 12:1 Copyright © 2003
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 12(1), 145–151; 033443
40P 09 Book reviews (JS/D) 20/1/03 11:03 am Page 145
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