‘I’ve stood at so many windows’: Women in Prison, Performativity and Survival

This article offers examples from working with women through a performance-based methodology that sought to understand how women survive the prison system. It proceeds with a reading of how prisons—characterized by citation from criminal records, sentences and files—are important locations for considering how time, memory, guilt or innocence, past, present and future perform. I am particularly interested in how these elements correlate with social gender expectations, and in line with literary and performance studies scholars Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick (1995), I consider a series of examples from fieldwork to exemplify how constructions of women’s painful pasts become narratives to which they must testify repeatedly. The value of performance and performativity is as a means of investigating institutions and how women in prison present themselves, their histories and futures beyond the texts of sentences and policies. We are thus able to engage with how norms, desires and resistance provide different modes of performing futures. For women in prison, such futures are by necessity framed as rehabilitation and transformation.