Lesbian Life in a French Prison: Surveillance, Refuge and Self-Naming

Abstract

This article was based upon an ethnographic study undertaken in 2017 and 2018 in a women’s prison in France. It relies on 42 interviews with inmates and 36 public and private employees and professionals that were carried out in a variety of carceral spaces (cell, exercise rooms, workshops, spaces for cultural, pedagogical or sports activities, professional training, collective gatherings in the courtyard or specially designated “socializing”– or leisure – rooms). While carceral social life is always shaped by confinement and the never-ending confrontation between different logics of otherness around gender and race, this article focuses on the conditions for same-sex sexual and emotional lives among women. How do these relationships unfold and what might be the disciplinary modes of control that lesbians are subjected to while incarcerated? How, for what use, and to what effect are categories of gender and race mobilized within this heteronormative space?

Translated by Sandrine Sanos, Professeure d’histoire contemporaine, Texas A & M University – Corpus Christi.