Feminist Studies articles from June 2004

Feminist Studies archives from June 2004

Preface.(Editorial)
June 22, 2004... AS WE PREPARE THIS SPECIAL ISSUE of Feminist Studies on women and prisons for publication, the abuse of Iraqis detained at Abu Ghraib prison has come to light. Stories and images witnessing the sexual humiliation and other types of abuse...

Erratum.(Correction Notice)
June 22, 2004... In volume 30, no. 1 (Spring 2004), Paola Bacchetta and Sandra Gunning should have been identified as co-authors of the preface. We apologize for our incorrect attribution.

Prisoner.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... DO NOT COVER YOUR FACE YOU MUST BE IDENTIFIED IF YOU CHANGE YOUR APPEARANCE OR ARE CHANGED BY ATTRITION YOU MUST BE REIDENTIFIED naked she stands a number fixed in a photo categorized/classified she appears to...

Three women.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... two women sit on the couch a third on her heels between them a bench a private tableau carved in crowded prison space Vietnamese dashed with English skims across the din they spoon out rice fish a bit of pirated green...

Air Nike slam dunk.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Vietnamese women forced to work 65 hours per week for 10 dollars no time for basketball games

Yvette, prison poet goes home.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... She seldom talks much till star-glazed jazz calls her out cruise control gives way sister throws off self-silence poet notes dance from her lips

Night showers.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Fifteen years ago I bathed in morning's anticipation now, after the sun drops over the edge of the world I hasten into showers where water falls from walls etched by prisoners' tears and curses into safety I slide fugitive...

Dear Liz.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... we talked of death there was no one else who would talk of death makes people nervous tongues stutter we are all dying every day you told me you wanted to scream you're not dying like I'm dying ...

Not a life sentence.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... only a few years to do the prisoner's health crumbles her complaints callously dismissed shut up in correction's closets only a year left to do the prisoner dies November 2000

More than just words: women's poetry and resistance at cook county jail.
June 22, 2004... What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it's easy to forget that it's not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavor (every poem breaks a silence that had to be...

All Ellas: girls locked up.
June 22, 2004... IF YOU GO TO THE WEB SITE of the Florida State Department of Corrections (DOC), you will find a color photo of Jessica Robinson, a thirteen-year-old at the time of her offense. She went from the streets to Florida adult prison with no time in...

Making home/making "stranger": an interview with Cheryl Dunye.(Interview)
June 22, 2004... In approaching this piece I was interested in how connected a lot of these women are to the outside world and how they find that balance to being an inmate, being a mother, being a member of a family or a clan, or a group that got...

Parental rights of incarcerated mothers with children in foster care: a policy vacuum.
June 22, 2004... THE DRAMATIC INCREASE over the past two decades in the number of women in prison has prompted considerable research and advocacy on behalf of those who are mothers, much of it focused on improving or facilitating their ability to parent from...

Do prisoners have abortion rights?
June 22, 2004... I would rather not be here this time of the evening having to strike the last word to stand up for women who cannot stand up for themselves, but since there are those who have chosen to pick on the most vulnerable...

Voices in Time.
June 22, 2004... AS WE INHABIT OUR HOMES, so they inhabit us. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard lyrically recalled the ways in which his earliest domestic space, his beloved childhood home, imprinted itself in the deepest nooks and crannies of his...

"Undesirable relations": same-sex relationships and the meaning of sexual desire at a women's reformatory during the Progressive Era.
June 22, 2004... IN A LETTER CONFISCATED BY prison authorities in 1920, Lena Lebofsky, a white inmate of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, wrote black inmate Elsie Freeman, "Some fine day I'm going to grab you and make you warm me up...

Balancing gender equity for women prisoners.
June 22, 2004... It isn't the demands for sex for me anymore. After twenty years in prison, it's about losing the last thing I have, my private body self. It's the male guards watching my naked body, openly, and as I get Older the comments change to...

Some time in crime.
June 22, 2004... WHEN I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE in 1972, I was living in a small town in a midwestern state. The culture there was decidedly southern, at least when compared to Detroit, Michigan, where I grew up. There was just one movie house and it seemed like...

Women in prison and work.
June 22, 2004... WHEN A WOMAN GOES to jail, she is confronted with time--mostly idle time. In many county jails, there is little to do: a few orderly or trustee jobs perhaps, and daily-demanded tasks such as making a meagerly furnished bed. The real work is to...

Prison narratives, narrative prisons: incarcerated women reading Gayl Jones's "Eva's Man".
June 22, 2004... I couldn't, I mean really, I couldn't put a name on Eva. --Shelly, North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women Eva bein' Eva, I said, man, we went through some hell, didn't we girl! You know, comin' up and stuff. --Audrey, North...

The Medea Project: mythic theater for incarcerated women.
June 22, 2004... [S]ometimes the stories take you and fling you against a wall sometimes you go right through the wall --Alicia Ostriker, "coda," The Volcano Sequence PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST Rhodessa Jones began conducting drama...

Counting down the days.
June 22, 2004... TRANSITIONS IN 1999, WHILE I WAS still incarcerated and counting down the days to my release, I wrote in my journal: "Christmas, the mid-winter festival of light coming into the darkness. New Year's, the celebration of resolutions, change...

Abu Ghraib: arguing against exceptionalism.
June 22, 2004... "Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men," Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle...

News and views.
June 22, 2004... AS THE EDITORS of this special issue remark, evidence of torture against Abu Ghraib prisoners by U.S. and U.K. military troops continues to surface as we go into production with this issue. Even as the international media's focus remains on the...