What Words Might Do: The Challenge of Representing Women in Prison and Their Writing

Abstract

In seeking to increase visibility of the experiences of incarcerated women involved with literacy programs, it is too easy to simplify the relationship among prisoners/teachers/texts and to overlook the material and rhetorical implications of literacy work behind bars. The article argues for methods of representing incarcerated women and their writing that resist mainstream subjectivities and provide means for more fully acknowledging the complex circumstances in which incarcerated women’s writing is produced and circulated. In order to theorize a feminist ethic of literacy work behind bars, the article grounds its discussion in an analysis of the documentary What I Want My Words To Do To You (Katz et al. 2003) because it is representative of growing feminist efforts to document or otherwise transmit carceral writing, particularly writing by women. The article calls for a feminist ethic for prison literacy work and suggests feminist practices for facilitating and representing writing programs based in understanding how complex material and discursive contexts might work to (re)shape institutional realities for the thousands of women and girls incarcerated around the globe.