Drawing on the disciplines of social sciences and humanities, particularly criminology, this book takes a multifaceted look at social constructions of the deviant body, and the female body in particular, revealing the interaction between dominant discourses and practices on the body.
Bringing together texts that address, among other subjects, psychiatric power, state torture, genetic identification, the “anatomy” of the criminal, aging and self-injury in prisons, and the control exercised over homosexual bodies or those of sex workers, this collection reflects an archaeology of the evil body, a body that is both a site of control and a site of resistance.
The question of the body has always been an acute one in criminology, even if it remains largely untheorized and unproblematized, despite the many changes observed in knowledge and practice. What's more, given our society's fascination with deviant bodies, it seemed essential to explore how the construction of deviant bodies (male and female) reconducts or modifies symbolic representations of the “normal” body.
“If the individual is trapped in his body under the control of institutions that invest his relationship to the world, he nonetheless has beautiful escapes that constantly remind the guardians of order that no one is ever totally submissive.”
David Le Breton, excerpt from the preface
Carceral or psychiatric imprisonment involves a long ritual of degradation and humiliation. The stripping away of self begins with entry formalities, during which identity papers, jewelry, money and personal belongings are taken away from the inmate. Weighed, measured, assigned a serial number and redefined, their former identity is obscured. Deprived of family, sexuality, schedule, children, friends, work and leisure. The totalitarian institution of prison or its derivatives gives birth to a new individual stamped by the administration. It induces a radical experience of self-possession, a stoppage of time. The family is often geographically distant, and visits difficult.
For incarcerated men and women, dizziness, problems with skin, teeth, diet, elimination, etc. are commonplace. Aging seems to accelerate, along with self-denigration. The time spent in detention is devoid of meaning, an eternal repetition of the same non-events, an unchanging and banal timetable, punctuated by visits, mail, waiting for trial or release; a duration devoid of meaning while, outside, the children grow up and life goes on. The feeling is strong of being nothing more than an insignificant cog in an indifferent machinery that works only by crushing individual identities.
Like Sylvie Frigon, several of the book's authors see the prisoner's body as a site of both control and resistance. The human condition is a bodily condition, and the confinement of the body implies losing the autonomy of one's existence. Imprisonment is first and foremost a reduction of the body to impotence, deprivation of movement, promiscuity between inmates, cramped cells, possible physical or sexual violence, imposed timetables, insipid food, absence of any intimacy... Coexistence in a narrow cell imposes a compromise with the sense of identity, personal dignity and convenience for all. The individual's body no longer belongs to him or her, and even the most intimate moments - urinating, excreting, washing, showering, etc. - are carried out in close proximity to others, whether fellow inmates or guards. Prison is a world of transparency of gaze, under the aegis of meticulous surveillance that transforms every private life into a public stage. In the cell, there are no places to retreat to in solitude, to catch one's breath, or even to engage in the intimate activities of life.
Confinement induces an artificial existence, a simulacrum of life slowly slipping away. The inmate recognizes himself less and less, both in the shape of his face and body, and in his sensory perceptions, which are impoverished by the asepsis of the premises. He often experiences a sensation of cold that persists despite the equipment or the seasons. The smells are prison odors, fetid, unpleasant, smells of dirt or cleaning products... Sight, mainly under artificial light, is always blocked by walls or bars; taste is banished under the auspices of prison food or “canteen” products; sound is now reduced to grilles or slamming doors, the eyecup rising, interpellations, the cries of those who break or fight, television... Carceral sensoriality is itself carceral, reduced to little more than a part of the sentence.
The symptoms of this uprooting from the world are numerous, and again bear witness to the body's muted resistance: headaches, stomach aches, pain of all kinds, amenorrhea, constipation, visual, hearing and taste disorders, depression, anxiety... Prisoners' painful gestures towards their own bodies abound. Madness, suicide attempts, hunger strikes, hygiene strikes and attacks on the body are other ways of resisting confinement, even if it means paying the price. Still others are ways of maintaining self-esteem and the conviction of not giving up: masturbation, tattooing, make-up, hairstyling and so on. Sylvie Frigon depicts women's incarcerated bodies as sites of control and resistance. Moving from attacks to the body, Sylvie Frigon and Claire Jenny take us through the world of prison dance to a celebration of the body.
Moreover, the prison's medical service is a place of recognition, friendship and release of tension, a place where the women finally abandon themselves and are the object of care and attention that make them feel alive and alive again. Of course, the body is immediately subjugated, but powers and disciplines are unable to penetrate it completely, since what it becomes always remains under the aegis of the subject's reflexivity. If the individual is trapped in his body under the control of institutions that invest his relationship to the world, he nonetheless has beautiful escapes that constantly remind the guardians of order that no one is ever totally submissive. For the prisoner, his body is the raw material of his freedom, even if it is also the raw material of his subjection.
Deprivation of the free use of one's time and body not only affects prisons, but also psychiatric institutions (see chapter by André Cellard). The history of psychosurgery, as recounted by Isabelle Perreault, notably through its use at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu between 1948 and 1956, is rather that of the definitive restraint of men or women at odds with their environment because of their lifestyle or character, or of patients who cannot come to terms with the psychiatric imprisonment and promiscuity to which they are subjected. Jennifer Kilty's text analyzes the deliberate self-inflicted wounds of female inmates through the same ambivalence: resistance to the situation of incarceration and a sign of intolerable external control exercised over the self.
As Shantz demonstrates, women sentenced to long prison terms or those who enter prison after committing any kind of offence are no longer young, and these incarcerated women are all the more stigmatized because they deviate from the image of the dignified woman. Dave Holmes and Stuart J. Murray, for their part, point to the implementation in some contemporary psychiatric institutions of a policy of radical normalization of behavior, far removed from any therapeutic intent. Jean-François Cauchie and Patrice Corriveau sketch the course of the homosexual body over time, particularly through the medicalization to which it was quickly subjected. Reality is only a question of point of view, as Chris Bruckert reminds us, as she has focused on street sex workers, who are immediately associated with defilement and disease. Bio criminology has equipped itself with powerful tools, as Dominique Robert and Martin Dufresne remind us, but it has nothing to do with the idea that genes determine behavior, another attempt to naturalize the “criminal body” as a destiny.
Torture is another, even more tragic form of imprisonment, which testifies to an absolute hold over a victim dispossessed even of his or her own body. This is what Sandra Lehalle shows us in her phenomenology of torture.
The authors of this book share a number of common themes. With rigor and the methods specific to their disciplines, they analyze certain areas of prison or psychiatric institutions, but they also give the reader the possibility of distancing themselves. These are texts that blur the old evidence and force us to think differently, not only to understand better, but also to transform the world in a more propitious way.
With texts by Chris Bruckert, Jean-François Cauchie, André Cellard, Patrice Corriveau, Martin Dufresne, Dave Holmes, Claire Jenny, Jennifer M. Kilty, Sandra Lehalle, Stuart J. Murray, Isabelle Perreault, Dominique Robert and Laura R. Shantz
Sylvie Frigon holds a PhD from the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University in England. She is a full professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. She is Vice-Dean of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences. She held the position of Joint Chair in Women's Studies at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University from 2014-2016. She is a Peterhouse Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge in England. She held the Faculty Chair “Prison in Culture, Culture in Prison” (2016-2019). She has published numerous scientific articles, chapters and books. She has published three novels: Écorchées, Ariane et son secret and C'est où chez nous? Her reflections on the body can be found in the book Chairs incarcérées: une exploration de la danse en prison with choreographer Claire Jenny, and in the collective work Danse, enfermement et corps résilients. She was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award by the Faculty of Social Sciences (2010-2011). She was a consultant for the Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2018 and Arts Access Aotearoa in 2024 in New Zealand. A new book on prison theater with Thana Ridha will be published in 2025 by the University of Ottawa Press.
Corps suspects, corps déviants, edited by Sylvie Frigon, Éditions du remue-ménage, Montréal, 2012.