Gendered Custody: The Drowning Moment that Never Ends (Inertia as Social Training)

Abstract

This paper discusses a visual arts practice that articulates the lived experience of incarceration as a form of knowledge production that gives voice to the affect of carceral practices. The author considers this knowledge in relation to standard forms of academic discourse, seen as an extension of a static framework of representational practices. Standard academic papers are discussed as forming part of a larger logic of Othering that views the incarcerated female as ‘subject’ within the scaffoldings of power. The way such power acts over the body is discussed in relation to broader social actions over the raced/gendered and classed body. These coercive frameworks enact a permanent state of enclosure, denial, erasure and abuse, where prison becomes an extension of a lifelong suite of punitive schedules. The author’s practice enacts affect in order to give agency to this lived experience and voice subjectivity over being the subject of someone else’s perspectival regime of knowledge.