Abstract
Men’s prisons have a very distinctive smell. The number of male bodies, doing male things, presenting male identities—corporeal masculinities—results in a very unique scent. The concept of gendered identity being an action, a presentation, a ‘process’ (Jenkins 2008), is particularly useful when placing the prison individual into an academic framework which argues that masculinity is also a selection of actions and processes undertaken for the benefit of both the self and others who are watching. What should be recognised from the start, however, is that this process of watching and being watched—the notion of gaze and spectacle—is highly gendered in itself. In modern Western culture, women are posited in the realm of the watched, the spectacle, the observed—men are the watchers, the spectators, the powerful gaze (see Cohan 1993; Neale 1993; Healey 1994; Boscagli 1996; White 2007: 33). Those who watch have power over the watched—the power to judge, the power to assign cultural importance through recognition, the power to grant masculinity (Kimmel 1994). With this in mind, the performance of identity is gendered before the action even begins, and the audience can be vital in shaping the process.
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Sloan, J.A. (2016). Corporeal Masculinities. In: Masculinities and the Adult Male Prison Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39915-1_3
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