(En)gendering Habitus: Women, Prison, Resistance
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10486801.2013.858327
ISSN1477-2264
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoAbstractThis paper posits that both formal theatre and everyday performances in prison provide a means of foregrounding the slippage between articulations of equality and practices that remain fixed in discursive binaries of good/bad; chaste/whore; compliant/deviant. Two plays by Rebecca Lenkiewicz – Her Naked Skin and That Almost Unnameable Lust – are considered in order to explore what I call an engendered ‘habitus’. In this article, I examine the ways contemporary performances about women in prison have foregrounded gendered behaviours in relation to the institution. Prison is considered as a setting for the durational performances of incarcerated bodies, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is deployed to consider everyday dispositions within the specific field. Theatre provides an aesthetic frame through which to consider prisons and Caoimhe McAvinchey’s notion of the performativity of punishment. Bourdieu’s interconnected concepts of habitus and field frame the investigation into the work of a single playwright, Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Notes1. Caoimhe McAvinchey, Theatre & Prison (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).2. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, ed. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979).4. Karlene Faith, Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement and Resistance, 2nd edn (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).5. Judith Butler, ‘Performativity’s Social Magic’, in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by R. Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 113–28.6. Lisa Adkins, ‘Introduction: Feminism, Bourdieu and after’, in Feminism After Bourdieu, ed. by Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Toril Moi, ‘Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture’, New Literary History, 22 (Autumn 1991), 1017–49.7. Moi, ‘Appropriating Bourdieu’.8. Elaine Aston, ‘Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting’, Theatre Journal, 62 (December 2010), 575–91.9. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; and The Logic of Practice.10. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.11. Helena Kennedy, Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice (London: Vintage, 2005), pp. 1–31.12. See Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Paul Heritage, ‘Rebellion and Theatre in Brazilian Prisons: An Historical Footnote’, in Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices, ed. by James Thompson (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998), pp. 231–38.13. a tender subject was performed in a secret location in March 2012. See A. Walsh, ‘Performing Prisons, Performing Punishment: The Banality of the Cell in Contemporary Theatre’, Total Theatre Magazine (Summer 2012), 13–14.14. Baz Kershaw, ‘Pathologies of Hope in Drama and Theatre’, in Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, ed. by Michael Balfour (Bristol: Intellect, 2004), pp. 35–51.15. See Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty’, Theatre Journal, 54 (October 2002), 339–67; and McAvinchey, Theatre & Prison.16. McAvinchey, Theatre & Prison, p. 60.17. This gained prominence in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.18. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), pp. 227–29.19. Ibid., p. 229.20. Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 155.21. Ibid.22. Maria Shevtsova, ‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu’s Champ and Habitus for a Sociology of Stage Productions’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 12.3 (2002), 35–66 (p. 58).23. Loïc Wacquant, ‘Habitus’, in International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, ed. by Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovski (London: Routledge, 2004), 315–19 (p. 315).24. See Lois McNay, ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field’, Theory, Culture & Society, 16.1 (February 1999), 95–117.25. Ibid., p. 100.26. Kennedy, Eve Was Framed, p. 24.27. Frances Heidensohn, Women and Crime, 2nd edn (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1996), p. xi.28. Ibid., p. 83.29. Ibid., p. 96.30. Ibid., p. 99.31. For example, Clean Break’s recent work staged a one act play about two Nigerian girls criminalised after being victims of sex trafficking (Rebecca Prichard, Dream Pill Charged, 2010), and Sam Holcroft’s play Dancing Bears engages with girls in gangs. Prichard says ‘[i]f you write really realistic stuff, that’s purely realistic and you stick to traditional structures, you give an expectation or pattern that fulfills itself, as if you are saying everything is doomed. . . If you do pure social realism, it feels to me as if you are kind of saying this is the way it is and all we can do is despair.’ Rebecca Prichard cited in Aston, ‘Feeling the Loss of Feminism’, p. 585.32. Heidensohn, Women and Crime, p. 103; Pat Carlen, Women’s Imprisonment: A Study of Social Control (London: Routledge, 1983); and Women and Punishment: The Struggle for Justice, ed. by Carlen (Portland: Willan Publishing, 2002).33. Carol Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 182.34. Ibid., p. 199.35. This was the primary finding in Home Office reports. See Jean Corston, A Report by Baroness Jean Corston of a Review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System (London: Home Office, 2007); Corston, Women in the Penal System: Second Report on Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System (London: Report for Howard League for Penal Reform, 2011).36. Lorraine Gelsthorpe, ‘Women, Crime and Control’, Criminology & Criminal Justice, 10.4 (November 2010), 375–86 (p. 380).37. This line is delivered by Katherine in That Almost Unnameable Lust, scene 8. Rebecca Lenkiewicz, ‘That Almost Unnameable Lust’, in Charged (London: Nick Hern Books, 2010), pp. 115–36 (p. 126). Subsequent references to the play are given in parentheses.38. While Lenkiewicz wrote the first original play to be staged there, this claim was inaccurate, since Coram Boy (2005) was adapted by Helen Edmundson. For critical responses to Lenkiewicz, see Dominic Cavendish, ‘Her Naked Skin: Rapture and Pain among the Suffragettes’, Telegraph, 4 August 2008 [accessed 30 May 2013]; Kate Kellaway, ‘Turning the Tables’ (Interview with Rebecca Lenkiewicz), Observer, 29 June 2008 [accessed 30 May 2013]; and National Theatre, ‘Her Naked Skin Production Notes’ (2008), [accessed 30 May 2013] [URL no longer active].39. See, for example, Viv Groskop, ‘Sex and the Suffragette’, Guardian, 26 August 2008 [accessed 30 May 2013].40. The lesbian plot line deserves additional attention, and could be usefully modelled as ‘transgressive habitus’.41. See Groskop, ‘Sex and the Suffragette’.42. This justification for habitus is seen in Loïc Wacquant and Pierre Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 81.43. See Cavendish, ‘Her Naked Skin’; and Groskop, ‘Sex and the Suffragette’.44. Florence Boorman’s line that is repeated throughout Her Naked Skin.45. McAvinchey, Theatre & Prison, pp. 37–38.46. Cultural Criminology, ed. by Jeff Ferrell and Clinton R. Sanders, 3rd edn (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995).47. See Bourdieu The Logic of Practice, p. 56. Also see McNay, ‘Agency and Experience: Gender as a Lived Relation’, in Feminism After Bourdieu, ed. by Adkins and Skeggs (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 175–90.48. Terry Lovell, ‘Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu’, Feminist Theory, 1 (April 2000), 11–32 (p. 18).49. Recent performances from different approaches to contemporary theatre have explored the ways site and audience engagement serve to resonate more complex relationships between prison spaces, the phenomenology of ‘the cage’ and prisoners’ journeys through prison spaces. These include Badac Theatre’s The Factory Edinburgh Festival, 2008; Clean Break’s staging of Lucy Kirkwood’s it felt empty when the heart went at first but it’s alright now, Arcola Theatre, 2009; and Hydrocracker’s staging of Harold Pinter’s New World Order, Brighton Festival, 2011.50. By contrast, Clean Break is avowedly feminist in its advocacy and education programme and its artistic programme commissions women to write new work. Further research would be valuable in relation to the feminist thrust in their recent commissions.51. See Groskop, ‘Sex and the Suffragette’.
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