Affection as Resistance Strategy in a Women's Prison

Abstract

Academic literature on prisons usually focuses on the negative aspects of these institutions, as well as on the so-called “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes, 1958), which refer to all the deprivations that incarcerated people suffer daily and structurally. But prisons can also be spaces in which “good things happen” (Jewkes, 2015: xi) and whose logics of surveillance and control are opposed by the production of various resistance practices by the inmates; practices that also help with personal (re)construction and self-affirmation. Affection is one of them. The objective of this article is to show the production of (self-)care and affection in a women's prison. For it, I will analyse relationships and support networks between them with the school as a backdrop, highlighting how it facilitated encounters and the way in which women described its importance and influence in their lives. The purpose of the article is to highlight, through the speeches of the protagonists, that prisons can be ambiguous spaces and that, beyond the diverse and evident layers of violence that cross them, they also offer loopholes for affection and care.